Bertrand Russell : The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 1st Edition

by Ray Monk (Author)

14 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0684828022

ISBN-10: 0684828022

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Born in 1872, the third child of Viscount Amberley, heir to the Russell earldom, Bertrand Russell was to become the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. His early masterpiece Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, set the course for the modern and post modern preoccupation with language; its philosophical ambitions are what drew Ludwig Wittgenstein from Vienna to Cambridge to study under the already famous Russell. But Russell's interest in philosophy was only one aspect of his prodigious appetite for ideas. His anti-war pamphlets and protests got him expelled from the university and imprisoned - not for the last time.
Russell's personal life was marked by the same promiscuous drive as his public one. The author of Marriage and Morals - a book that received special citation in the award of Russell's 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature - boldly applied his free-thinking principles in his own most intimate relationships. His spectacular success in seducing women, both married and single, constituted a relentless challenge to the Victorian morality that was his aristocratic birthright. Russell's avant-garde philosophy of free love combined with his principled pacificism would make him an icon of the international Left in the 1960s.
In short, Russell's was a protean life so vast in influence, relationships and interests that it is virtually a window on the major historical events of the twentieth century. The Spirit of Solitude is the first biography of this towering figure to go behind Russell's public life and reveal a complex and even contradictory character that has, until now, remained obscure.

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Editorial Reviews

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Volume I of Ray Monk's life of Bertrand Russell is a penetrating and highly critical portrait of one of this century's most influential intellectual figures. Monk's talents as a writer and his knowledge of philosophy produce clear and lucid prose that is sophisticated in its understanding, yet doesn't shy away from the dishy details that make the book compelling. This initial volume takes us through the first fifty years of Russell's private, public, and intellectual life. We follow Russell through his boyhood and schooling, his two marriages and countless love affairs, his friendships with eminent intellectuals such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot (plus an affair with Eliot's wife Vivien), and the members of the Bloomsbury Group, up to the birth of Russell's son in 1921. The inner Russell is tumultuous, fighting off fears of madness, and full of insatiable longings. We also see Russell's public life: his outspoken commitment to pacifism which ultimately led to his imprisonment, as well as his early advocacy and later disillusionment with socialism. Ray Monk is particularly adept at explicating Russell's philosophy: his desire to bring an end to interminable philosophical debates by developing new techniques for the logical analysis of philosophical problems. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Monk demonstrated that cracking good stories exist in the arcana of academic philosophy and in the lives of philosophers. The vastness of Russell's life and the breadth of his interests, in addition to the brilliance of his mind, makes Monk's story all the more captivating.

From Publishers Weekly

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, "Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one's humanity." His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk's first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell's own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell's correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell's compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) "whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth." When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, "It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood." Mining Russell's papers to let him speak for himself, Monk lets him explain?and betray?himself. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 720 pages
Publisher: Free Press; 1st edition (October 11, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684828022
ISBN-13: 978-0684828022
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 14 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #610,215 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #481 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Philosophers
- #3563 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Political
- #107427 in Books > Textbooks

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Dennis E. Hamilton

Nightmare Beyond the Pythagorean Dream

January 2, 2001

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This tiny book amazes me. Rather than attempt a biography, Monk focuses on one theme of Russell's life: his adventure with mathematics and the drive to reduce all of mathematics to logic, crystallized as a pristine whole of pure beauty -- the ultimate achievement of rational thought. Retracing the inspiration, successes, and ultimate defeat of that program, interpolating through the stages of Russell's own writings, Monk provides us with a glimpse of the integrity of a life committed to taking a major philosophical inquiry to an honest but unwanted and discouraging conclusion. In retracing the path of Russell's mathematical passion, Monk provides brief thumbnails of the major concepts that illuminated the route to today's mathematical logic and its foundational construction: one that in itself demonstrates the impossibility of a purely logical system that resolves all of mathematics as a wonder of deductive reasoning.

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What book are we talking about?

February 3, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The book that I ordered from this page is 58 pages and covers one small, but important, aspect of Russell's life. That is his evolution as a mathematician and philosopher and the theory in his "The Principles of Mathematics", his magnum opus.

Is there a 600 page book by monk about Russell's entire life? That's what I hoped to read because I am, hopelessly, not a Mathematician at any level and really did not understand this to any degree, nor do I want to. The blurb on the cover states; "...Ray Monk's exhilarating, clear, readable guide tells a compelling human tale, too: a moving story of love and loss, of ecstatic triumph, and deep disillusion."

Not in this edition, it doesn't.

I'm still looking for a good biography of Russell's life for the general reader.

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Joy Bertwell

Five Stars

December 18, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Great value. Speedy delivery.

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ptb

but I can't say anything good about the publisher

July 10, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Very well-written book, but I can't say anything good about the publisher. The book is coming apart. I never dropped it or anything. I've never seen a book self-destruct like that.

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Mick

Damning with faint praise ...

July 14, 2016

Format: Hardcover

I must confess I only read up to the year 1914, but I fell I can confidently state that this is not so much a biography, as an attempt at historical fiction. Another reviewer described it as tabloid trash, but I wouldn't quite go that far. Only because in the description of events and reproduction of Russell's own letters the book is accurate, as it follows Ronald Clark's biography to a tee. I have compared the Clark book to the Monk book and it is evident that Monk followed Clark's chronology and documentation of events very diligently. The way that Monk chose to rehash these events is his only original contribution, if you can call bias a contribution. His POV emphasizes all of Russell's personal flaws and labels many of his contributions as purely derivative from the work of others. Likewise, although this biography attempts to discuss some of Russell's mathematical and philosophical ideas, his 'discussions' don't seem to be intended to clarify the general ideas or Russell's specific contributions. Instead, Monk is content to dwell on areas where Russell failed to achieve what he intended and the disillusionment that followed or to repeat the episodes from Clark regarding his errors of memory. At least Clark has the decency to supply reasons as to why Russell could have become confused in recalling some of the facts about his earlier work.
I give a two star rating only because he did use Clark's chronology and even includes the same quotes from Russell's letters, although he omits any details from Clark that lend Russell credence . A careful study of Monk's deviations from Clark makes his intent transparent.
In short, when Monk is objective, he is unoriginal; when he attempts to be original, he is not objective.

I do not recommend Monk to open-minded readers who want a balanced view of Russell...read Clark instead.

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THE FIRST VOLUME OF A MASTERFUL BIOGRAPHY OF A TOWERING 20TH CENTURY INTELLECTUAL

January 28, 2013

Format: Hardcover

Ray Monk lectures in philosophy at the university of Southampton, UK; he has also written Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind, etc. The successor volume to this 1996 book is Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, The Ghost of Madness.

He wrote in the Introduction, "The other two biographies of Russell so far published---Ronald Clark's The life of Bertrand Russell and Caroline Moorhead's Bertrand Russell: A Life---are more searching in their exploration of Russell's private life, and their authors less constrained... But both suffer from ... a more or less complete lack of interest in Russell's philosophical work... The aim of this book is ... trying to take into account the full force of each of the 'great winds' that Russell describes: his need for love, his yearning for certain knowledge, and his sometimes overpowering impulse to become involved in the great political issues of his day... But the challenge... is to understand how [these admirable qualities] can coexist with a sometimes quite chilling coldness to those close to him, and a disturbing capacity for deep and dark hatreds." (Pg. xviii-xx)

He observes, "Russell was fond---perhaps over-fond---of presenting his life as a series of epiphanies, many of which, one suspects, were overplayed by him in later life for the sake of lending drama to the facts of his life." (Pg. 137) He suggests, "The sense of loss he had experienced in giving up his religious beliefs had never quite deserted him, but now he began to feel that, in his love for Ottoline [Morrell], he had something that preserved whatever was valuable and beautiful in religious faith without committing him... to any false beliefs." (Pg. 209) He wrote to her, "I shall always be - hungry for your God and blaspheming him. I could pour forth a flood of worship - the longing for religion is at times almost unbearably strong." (Pg. 243) In a later letter, he said, "Indeed passion is of God... the unquenchable thirst for heaven--it is the power that drives us to seek out good. We are all exiles in this nether world, and all passion has something of homesickness.'" (Pg. 257)

He writes perceptively of Russell's relationship with Wittgenstein: "Russell was still inclined to look upon Wittgenstein's work as a kind of 'fine tuning' of his own... Wittgenstein was not repairing it, as Russell continued to think, but was demolishing it altogether." (Pg. 290) He adds, "As Russell was slow to realise (perhaps he never realised it), his relationship with Wittgenstein suffered from the very beginning from his insistence on casting Wittgenstein in a role for which he was unsuited... with Wittgenstein representing the logician, the scientist..." (Pg. 343) He concludes, "[Russell's] refusal to take offense at Wittgenstein's brusque dismissal of his own work... [was] connected with his desire to preserve his own intellectual integrity. Who better than Wittgenstein... to act as his philosophical conscience?" (Pg. 565)

Monk's book is, like his earlier book on Wittgenstein, superb, and is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about Russell's and his contributions to philosophy.

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