Contemporary Philosophy in Australia

Robert and Rollins Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317853428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. This is volume VI of twenty-two in a series of 20th Century Philosophy focuses on contemporary philosophy in Australia that was dominated by the schools of Sydney and Melbourne and the works of John Anderson.

1

JOHN PASSMORE

RUSSELL AND BRADLEY

Few men who have been disciples are left unaffected by their discipleship, however sharply they may break with their former masters. If they cease to be disciples, they have a strong tendency to swing to what the world regards as ‘the opposite extreme’ from the doctrines their masters had taught them. But furthermore, the ‘opposite extreme’ they choose turns out very often, on closer examination, to be not so ‘opposite’ as at first sight appears. So a former Communist is not uncommonly converted into an anti-Communist of quite exceptional virulence, who continues to deploy in the interests of his new cause the controversial recklessness, the paranoid suspiciousness, which he learnt from his earlier teachers. He may become a convert to a more bigoted sort of Roman Catholicism but will seldom end his days as a model of tolerance and liberality.

It is important to remember just how ardently the young Bertrand Russell espoused Hegelianism, as he makes perfectly clear in My Philosophical Development.¹ In 1898—i.e. at the age of twenty-six—Russell was still trying to write a dialectical philosophy of nature. Of course, we have to ask ourselves in what his Hegelianism consisted. Like a great many creative thinkers, Russell has never been particularly good at understanding other philosophers, even when, as in the case of Frege or Meinong, he greatly admired their work. And the situation in regard to Hegel is complicated by the fact that he had British representatives, or what were commonly supposed to be such. There was McTaggart: the most idiosyncratic of disciples, unusual amongst British Hegelians, however, in taking Hegel–s dialectic as seriously as the young Russell himself did. And then there was Bradley. No Hegelian certainly, but commonly described as one, he had sufficient in common with Hegel to attract the admiration of Hegel–s disciples. The ‘Hegel’ against whom the young Russell reacted was in all probability not Hegel himself but McTaggart, with regard to the dialectic, and Bradley as to monism. These, there can be little doubt, are the philosophers he referred to in ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’¹ as ‘the people who more or less follow Hegel’.² My present concern is with Bradley.

We can sum up Bradley–s main—and so far Hegelian—thesis as being that ‘The truth is the whole’. The further our judgments are from the whole, according to Bradley, the less of truth there is in them. No judgment is wholly satisfactory; this is a consequence of the fact that to judge is to distinguish subject from predicate and thus to mutilate the unity of the whole. (‘I accepted’, writes Russell of his early philosophical beliefs, ‘the Hegelian view that none of the sciences is quite true, since all depend on some abstraction and every abstraction leads, sooner or later, to contradictions.’)³ But of all judgments the least true, because the most remote from the whole, is the singular judgment. And of all singular judgments the poorest, the least true, is a judgment of the form ‘That is red’, assigning a sensory predicate to a merely designated subject. No judgment could less effectively represent, according to Bradley, the total system of reality. It is more, not less, ‘abstract’ than, let us say, ‘All whales are mammals’, for this judgment at least draws our attention to the systematic interconnection of properties in Reality—the properties of ‘being a whale’ and ‘being a mammal’—whereas ‘This is red’ does not even serve that very limited purpose.

In his My Philosophical Development Russell tells us that when he broke with Hegelianism his initial tendency was to accept as real everything which Hegel had denied to be real. ‘In my first rebellion against Hegel, I believed that a thing must exist if Hegel–s proof that it cannot is invalid’; ‘this gave me a very full universe.’⁴ To this it can be added, I think, that Russell came to believe that the most satisfactory of all propositions must be what Bradley took to be the least satisfactory—propositions like ‘This is red’. For Bradley, judgments are true only in so far as they point towards the total system of reality. The tendency in Russell–s philosophy is in the opposite direction, to argue that—at least so far as empirical propositions are concerned—the truth of a proposition resides in its being analysable into propositions truly asserting facts which are absolutely independent of one another.

Russell does not commit himself to this conclusion quite wholeheartedly; it was left to his pupil, Wittgenstein, to take the final steps. But it is certainly the direction in which Russell moved, towards a logical atomism only slightly mitigated, in the interests of induction, by an occasional exception. ‘It used to be thought’, Russell writes in My Philosophical Development, ‘that one fact could be logically dependent upon another. This can only be the case if one of the facts is really two facts put together. From “A and B are men” it follows logically that A is a man but that is because “A and B are men” is really two propositions put together.’¹ So whereas for Bradley every judgment was a representative, however unworthy, of Reality as a whole, for Russell an atomic proposition represented nothing but a single atomic fact: ‘All atomic propositions are mutually independent.’² If such an atomic proposition is rejected as false, its rejection would have no other effect except that this particular proposition no longer forms part of the totality of true propositions. Everything else would be exactly as it was before. To put the point metaphorically, for Russell for such a proposition to be proved false, would be as if an anonymous friendless stranger were to die alone, remote from human habitation, affecting by his death nobody but himself; for Bradley it would be as if a child, however imperfect, were to die in the midst of his family circle, inevitably affecting the general character of that circle by his death.

One of Bradley–s difficulties, as we have already seen, is that no judgment can adequately represent the Absolute. It is impossible to nominate an example of a true judgment because any judgment in some measure falsifies, merely in virtue of the fact that it distinguishes subject from predicate. So the standard of comparison by reference to which a judgment is (relatively) to be condemned as unworthily representing the Absolute is not a perfectly true judgment but only a judgment which, so it has to be supposed, comes close to the truth. Russell–s problem (and Wittgenstein–s) lay in precisely the reverse direction, but led to the same ‘unspeakable’ conclusion. No proposition which it is possible to nominate has the degree of independence they ascribed to an atomic fact; this, Bradley might say, is a consequence of the fact that propositions have predicates and are, so far, not wholly atomic—predicates introduce into them an element of generality. For Bradley every judgment is too independent to represent the Absolute; for Russell and Wittgenstein no proposition is independent enough to be atomic.

Consider, for example, ‘This is red’. If we reject this proposition, we may also have to reject such propositions as ‘This will suit Mary–s complexion’, ‘This will look well in my room’, ‘This is bright’, ‘This is the same colour as that object over there’. So it is not a wholly independent, atomic, proposition. As Wittgenstein recognized in the Tractatus, an atomic proposition would have to consist of logically proper names in immediate combination; nothing less will suffice. But then the problem is that ‘logically proper names’ are as elusive as the Absolute.

Russell himself defines logical atomism much less rigidly when, as in ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ he has in mind the contrast between himself and Bradley. ‘The logic which I shall advocate’, he says, ‘is atomistic as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel. When I say that my logic is atomistic I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things; I do not regard the apparent multiplicity of the world as consisting merely in phases and unreal divisions of a single indivisible Reality.’¹

The word ‘separate’ is here the rub. William James had drawn attention to a phenomenon he called ‘vicious intellectualism’; this consists in supposing that what is distinct cannot be related and what is related cannot be distinct. ‘It really seems “weird”,’ he wrote, ‘to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write—the “claim” that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!’² It is no less ‘weird’ to have to argue that there is not just one fact but a whole set of facts in ‘This is red’—or for that matter, in ‘Socrates is mortal’ or ‘All men are mortal’. If it is taken at the commonsense level, of course, the assertion that ‘There are many separate things’ is a mere commonplace. Indeed—since any assertion consists of a set of separate words and so does its negation—it would be ‘pragmatically self-refuting’ to try to deny that there are separate things.¹ But it by no means follows that there are particulars, defined as Russell defines them, particulars which have the peculiarity that ‘each of them stands entirely alone and is completely self-subsistent’.² Particulars, in this sense, are as mythical as Bradley–s Absolute. Instead of rejecting the whole concept of ‘what stands alone’ and ‘the self-subsistent’, what Russell has done is to transfer these properties from Bradley–s Absolute to atomic particulars.

Why does Russell set up this queer sort of metaphysics? Well for one thing, as comes out in a good many places in his writings, Russell imagines it to be the only alternative to monism. It is not, as it were, ‘safe’ to stop anywhere short of the pure particular; if we do, then before we know where we are we shall be back in the embraces of Bradley–s Absolute. We can protect ourselves against such conclusions as that ‘The truth is the whole’ or that ‘There is no Reality short of the Absolute’, so Russell thought, only by asserting that there are propositions whose truth cannot possibly consist in the contribution they make to a total system. For we see that they make no contribution to it and that there are entities from whose existence the existence of the Absolute cannot possibly be deduced, because it is their nature to exist in entire independence of the existence of anything else. From the fact that they exist, that is, nothing can be deduced.

There need be, Russell ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Russell and Bradley
• 2. The Existence of Universals
• 3. An Epistemological Concept of Truth
• 4. Fact, Form, and Intensionality
• 5. A Causal Account of Inferring
• 6. Colour-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes
• 7. Colours
• 8. People
• 9. Two Arguments Against the Identity Thesis
• 10. Mill's Third Howler
• 11. The Passage of Time
• Index