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Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher Video

My first introduction to Bertrand Russell occurred when someone at Oxford gave me a copy of his book, The Conquest of Happiness. Then, a few weeks later, he turned up in person for a University meeting of some sort, spreading his own special blend Grratest wit and wisdom and beaming with happiness.

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Who could resist so radiant a practitioner of his own theories? I reread that volume recently, Philosophr fifty years after its first publication, and, amid the modern Muggeridgean gloom, it is a light from another world. Bertrand Russell himself acknowledged that the light of nature shone more brightly in a past age, and in almost everything he ever wrote he strove to recover that particular translucent quality.

The Conquest of Happiness itself was little more than a footnote to his larger Philosophical theses, a practical manual not merely worth reading but ready for immediate application in everyday life. However, both before and after that little textbook was published, the conquest was carried Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher many Bsrtrand territories, by taunts, witticisms, light-hearted forays and full-scale philosophical assaults.

There have been morbid miseries fostered by gloomy creeds, which led men into profound inner discords that made all outward prosperity of no avail. All these are unnecessary.

In regard to all of them, means known by which they can be overcome. In the modern world, if communities Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher unhappy, it is because they choose to be so. Or, to speak more precisely, because they have ignorances, habits, beliefs, passions, which are dearer to them than happiness or even life. I find many men in our dangerous age who seem to be in love with misery and death, and who grow angry when hopes are suggested to them. That is an extract from Portraits from Memorypublished nearly thirty years after The Conquest of Happiness. It was not, heaven forgive us for even mentioning the term in such a connection, consistency of a feeble mind. It was all part of the spacious liberal doctrine of one who—more than any great man of his century, as I shall try to hint later—never sought to dodge the realities, bitter, tragic or whatever else they might be, which most directly challenged his creed.

He could, after all, put Malcolm Muggeridgism, Christopher Bookerism or Bernard Levinism or whatever label may be attached to the latest outbursts Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher mystical reaction in some perspective.

He wrote in that same Portraits from Memory :. For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy. Our English Epicurus was the target, throughout most of his life, of lies hardly less scandalous, but fortunately he devised for himself a shield which will never be penetrated.

He translated the word freedom from Greek and Roman and any other language into the purest English, or rather he saw how the English people and so many English writers had been engaged in this work before him, and not merely those directly in the liberal or revolutionary tradition but, hardly less, men like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume; all these too are enfolded into the great Bertrand Russell synthesis and help to make that shield irrefragable.

Early Years and Education

One part of the debt, his and ours, must be accorded to an English phenomenon, the Whig aristocracy which somehow made a most appealing virtue of not caring a damn for anybody. Hard, self-centred, materialist, pleasure-loving, it still offered, against all the odds, and in contra-distinction to what was here in almost every other country at the time, the essential protection for scepticism and the thought of the future.

Bertrand Russell was Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher into the bosom of it and never wanted to disown his heritage, although he came to appreciate its insufficiency. He could remember his grandfather recalling a visit to Napoleon in exile Bfrtrand Elba and a niece of Talleyrand giving him chocolates.

98 Most Profound Bertrand Russell Quotes:

Gladstone had quelled even his formidable grandparents. He wrote a loving essay on that grandfather, one which can help us to understand better than the historians why Lord John Russell had such a hold on the affections of his countrymen, yet the essay too has its hints of criticism:. My grandfather belonged to a type which is now extinct, the type of the aristocratic reformer whose zeal is derived from the classics, from Demosthenes and Tacitus, rather than Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher any more recent source.

They worshipped a goddess called Liberty, but her lineaments were rather vague. But was that quite fair to one who, after the true English style, battled for so many particular liberties? Due perhaps to the death of his mother and father in his infancy, he was inexpressibly lonely and shy and awkward. He was blessed or cursed by a Puritan soul, weighed down by a source of sin and the wickedness of sex.

To achieve his own liberation from this encircling darkness was a Herculean labour, and doubtless this is the reason why in his books he could so well strike off the chains of others. But the feat in his own case was accomplished by the most original means. And scarcely less excruciating was the story of the young man who fell disastrously in love with the Quaker girl, who thought sex was not merely wicked but beastly: the two condemned by the general ignorance of the time Bertrand Russell And The Greatest Philosopher endure the most haunting Victorian terrors. Poor Bertie had indeed to find his own way to the conquest of each particular happiness—even drink:. I did not take to drink until the king took the pledge during the first war.]