At the age of 95, Bertrand Russell wrote-
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Sadly, these were second order passions. Russell wanted to be loved, he was not interested in love itself which subsists with or without an object as a pure mutuality, Similarly, Russell wasn't actually interested in searching for knowledge. He wanted knowledge about knowledge- which, sadly, turns out to be nonsense. As for pity, it can only be for individuals, not an entire species because misfortune is always relative. The fact is Russell did not search out any type of knowledge which actually relieved the suffering of anybody. All his political interventions were foolish or counter-productive. What nobody could deny, however, was that he wrote well and had lived an interesting life.
These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
Russell had a marvelous, Edwardian, elasticity of self-regard. Thus, he never experienced anguish save such as swelled a great ocean, nor knew despair save by reaching its very verge.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.
Others sought love because, first and last, it's love, dude. Ecstasy is something you can buy- though it may only last a few hours.
I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
But that abyss has stuff useful to us. Sooner or later, we are going to be mining the asteroids and populating distant planets.
I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
Why not see it directly? The other point is that 'the union of love' is nicest when it results in the appearance of a bouncing baby. I believe Russell's own children and grandchildren have all done well. Mysticism is a consolation prize for those of us who have less valuable genes to pass on.
This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.
Human life requires sexual reproduction. Russell worked hard and was as smart as fuck. He deserved his reproductive success.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Sadly, he wasted his time on 'logicism'. The world must be as geometry says it should be otherwise we mathematicians might have to work on new types of geometry which would be a scandalous. Einstein begged to differ.
And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux.
Numbers don't hold sway over anything.
A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Russell, like his great ancestors, represented radical thought for his own age. His position in the Republic of Letters is secure. Shame Anal-tickle philosophy was shit.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth.
Which is why Heaven was invented in the first place. In the Good Place I too will have an above average sized dick.
Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
Sadly, Russell's political ambitions remained unfulfilled. Thus, he could not contribute to the sum total of avoidable misery.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. (1967, 3–4)
His kids and grandkids were brilliant. His own popular books were so charmingly and lucidly written that they opened a window, for working class people, into the world of cloistered academia. Perhaps, by adopting radical positions, but for absurd reasons, Russell- like his great political ancestors- helped conserve a system which was already changing along the required lines. His atheism- by inclining him to a magical type of logicism- proved self-defeating more particularly once the Church admitted that it was founded not on Aristotle's Organon- by Faith which must ever remain a mystery. The Katechon is the invisible hand or 'mysterious economy' which hold at bay the Eschaton or Apocalypse. It is only then that Akreibia- the rigid following of a rule- will come into its own, save by God's mercy.
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