A History of Western Philosophy Read online

  COPYRIGHT 1945 BY BERTRAND RUSSELL

  COPYRIGHT RENEWED © 1972 BY EDITH RUSSELL

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

  A TOUCHSTONE BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9915-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-9915-0

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  Table of Contents

  Preface by Author

  Introduction

  BOOK ONE. ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

  Part I. The Pre-Socratics

  Chapter I. The Rise of Greek Civilization

  Chapter II. The Milesian School

  Chapter III. Pythagoras

  Chapter IV. Heraclitus

  Chapter V. Parmenides

  Chapter VI. Empedocles

  Chapter VII. Athens in Relation to Culture

  Chapter VIII. Anaxagoras

  Chapter IX. The Atomists

  Chapter X. Protagoras

  Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

  Chapter XI. Socrates

  Chapter XII. The Influence of Sparta

  Chapter XIII. The Sources of Plato’s Opinions

  Chapter XIV. Plato’s Utopia

  Chapter XV. The Theory of Ideas

  Chapter XVI. Plato’s Theory of Immortality

  Chapter XVII. Plato’s Cosmogony

  Chapter XVIII. Knowledge and Perception in Plato

  Chapter XIX. Aristotle’s Metaphysics

  Chapter XX. Aristotle’s Ethics

  Chapter XXI. Aristotle’s Politics

  Chapter XXII. Aristotle’s Logic

  Chapter XXIII. Aristotle’s Physics

  Chapter XXIV. Early Greek Mathematics and Astronomy

  Part III. Ancient Philosophy after Aristotle

  Chapter XXV. The Hellenistic World

  Chapter XXVI. Cynics and Sceptics

  Chapter XXVII. The Epicureans

  Chapter XXVIII. Stoicism

  Chapter XXIX. The Roman Empire in Relation to Culture

  Chapter XXX. Plotinus

  BOOK TWO. CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY

  Introduction

  Part I. The Fathers

  Chapter I. The Religious Development of the Jews

  Chapter II. Christianity During the First Four Centuries

  Chapter III. Three Doctors of the Church

  Chapter IV. Saint Augustine’s Philosophy and Theology

  Chapter V. The Fifth and Sixth Centuries

  Chapter VI. Saint Benedict and Gregory the Great

  Part II. The Schoolmen

  Chapter VII. The Papacy in the Dark Ages

  Chapter VIII. John the Scot

  Chapter IX. Ecclesiastical Reform in the Eleventh Century

  Chapter X. Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy

  Chapter XI. The Twelfth Century

  Chapter XII. The Thirteenth Century

  Chapter XIII. Saint Thomas Aquinas

  Chapter XIV. Franciscan Schoolmen

  Chapter XV. The Eclipse of the Papacy

  BOOK THREE. MODERN PHILOSOPHY

  Part I. From the Renaissance to Hume

  Chapter I. General Characteristics

  Chapter II. The Italian Renaissance

  Chapter III. Machiavelli

  Chapter IV. Erasmus and More

  Chapter V. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation

  Chapter VI. The Rise of Science

  Chapter VII. Francis Bacon

  Chapter VIII. Hobbes’s Leviathan

  Chapter IX. Descartes

  Chapter X. Spinoza

  Chapter XI. Leibniz

  Chapter XII. Philosophical Liberalism

  Chapter XIII. Locke’s Theory of Knowledge

  Chapter XIV. Locke’s Political Philosophy

  Chapter XV. Locke’s Influence

  Chapter XVI. Berkeley

  Chapter XVII. Hume

  Part II. From Rousseau to the Present Day

  Chapter XVIII. The Romantic Movement

  Chapter XIX. Rousseau

  Chapter XX. Kant

  Chapter XXI. Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century

  Chapter XXII. Hegel

  Chapter XXIII. Byron

  Chapter XXIV. Schopenhauer

  Chapter XXV. Nietzsche

  Chapter XXVI. The Utilitarians

  Chapter XXVII. Karl Marx

  Chapter XXVIII. Bergson

  Chapter XXIX. William James

  Chapter XXX. John Dewey

  Chapter XXXI. The Philosophy of Logical Analysis

  Preface

  MANY histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy. I have found this particularly necessary as regards periods with which the general reader cannot be assumed to be familiar. The great age of the scholastic philosophy was an outcome of the reforms of the eleventh century, and these, in turn, were a reaction against previous corruption. Without some knowledge of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of the medieval Papacy, the intellectual atmosphere of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can hardly be understood. In dealing with this period, as with others, I have aimed at giving only so much general history as I thought necessary for the sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in relation to the times that formed them and the times that they helped to form.

  One consequence of this point of view is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is often not that which he deserves on account of his philosophic merit. For my part, for example, I consider Spinoza a greater philosopher than Locke, but he was far less influential; I have therefore treated him much more briefly than Locke. Some men—for example, Rousseau and Byron—though not philosophers at all in the academic sense, have so profoundly affected the prevailing philosophic temper that the development of philosophy cannot be understood if they are ignored. Even pure men of action are sometimes of great importance in this respect; very few philosophers have influenced philosophy as much as Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. Lycurgus, if only he had existed, would have been a still more notable example.

  In attempting to cover such a vast stretch of time, it is necessary to have very drastic principles of selection. I have come to the conclusion, from reading standard histories of philosophy, that very short accounts convey nothing of value to the reader; I have therefore omitted altogether (with few exceptions) men who did not seem to me to deserve a fairly full treatment. In the case of the men whom I have discussed, I have mentioned what seemed relevant as regards their lives and their social surroundings; I have even sometimes recorded intrinsically unimportant details when I considered them illustrative of a man or of his times.

  Finally, I owe a word of explanation and apology to specialists on any part of my enormous subject. It is obviously impossible to know as much about every philosopher as can be known about him by a man whose field is less wide; I have no doubt that every single philosopher whom I have mentioned, with the exception of Leibniz, is better known to many men than to me. If, however, this were considered a sufficient reason for respectful silence, it would follow that no man should undertake to tr
eat of more than some narrow strip of history. The influence of Sparta on Rousseau, of Plato on Christian philosophy until the thirteenth century, of the Nestorians on the Arabs and thence on Aquinas, of Saint Ambrose on liberal political philosophy from the rise of the Lombard cities until the present day, are some among the themes of which only a comprehensive history can treat. On such grounds I ask the indulgence of those readers who find my knowledge of this or that portion of my subject less adequate than it would have been if there had been no need to remember “time’s winged chariot.”

  This book owes its existence to Dr. Albert C. Barnes, having been originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania.

  As in most of my work during the last thirteen years, I have been greatly assisted, in research and in many other ways, by my wife, Patricia Russell.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Introductory

  THE conceptions of life and the world which we call “philosophical” are a product of two factors: one, inherited religious and ethical conceptions; the other, the sort of investigation which may be called “scientific,” using this word in its broadest sense. Individual philosophers have differed widely in regard to the proportions in which these two factors entered into their systems, but it is the presence of both, in some degree, that characterizes philosophy.

  “Philosophy” is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain.

  Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? If there is a way of living that is noble, in what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it? Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valued, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving towards death? Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what seems such merely the ultimate refinement of folly? To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have professed to give answers, all too definite; but their very definiteness causes modern minds to view them with suspicion. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.

  Why, then, you may ask, waste time on such insoluble problems? To this one may answer as a historian, or as an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness.

  The answer of the historian, in so far as I am capable of giving it, will appear in the course of this work. Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances. This interaction throughout the centuries will be the topic of the following pages.

  There is also, however, a more personal answer. Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

  Philosophy, as distinct from theology, began in Greece in the sixth century B.C. After running its course in antiquity, it was again submerged by theology as Christianity rose and Rome fell. Its second great period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, was dominated by the Catholic Church, except for a few great rebels, such as the Emperor Frederick II (1195-1250). This period was brought to an end by the confusions that culminated in the Reformation. The third period, from the seventeenth century to the present day, is dominated, more than either of its predecessors, by science; traditional religious beliefs remain important, but are felt to need justification, and are modified wherever science seems to make this imperative. Few of the philosophers of this period are orthodox from a Catholic standpoint, and the secular State is more important in their speculations than the Church.

  Social cohesion and individual liberty, like religion and science, are in a state of conflict or uneasy compromise throughout the whole period. In Greece, social cohesion was secured by loyalty to the City State; even Aristotle, though in his time Alexander was making the City State obsolete, could see no merit in any other kind of polity. The degree to which the individual’s liberty was curtailed by his duty to the City varied widely. In Sparta he had as little liberty as in modern Germany or Russia; in Athens, in spite of occasional persecutions, citizens had, in the best period, a very extraordinary freedom from restrictions imposed by the State. Greek thought down to Aristotle is dominated by religious and patriotic devotion to the City; its ethical systems are adapted to the lives of citizens and have a large political element. When the Greeks became subject, first to the Macedonians, and then to the Romans, the conceptions appropriate. to their days of independence were no longer applicable. This produced, on the one hand, a loss of vigour through the breach with tradition, and, on the other hand, a more individual and less social ethic. The Stoics thought of the virtuous life as a relation of the soul to God, rather than as a relation of the citizen to the State. They thus prepared the way for Christianity, which, like Stoicism, was originally unpolitical, since, during its first three centuries, its adherents were devoid of influence on government. Social cohesion, during the six and a half centuries from Alexander to Constantine, was secured, not by philosophy and not by ancient loyalties, but by force, first that of armies and then that of civil administration. Roman armies, Roman roads, Roman law, and Roman officials first created and then preserved a powerful centralized State. Nothing was attributable to Roman philosophy, since there was none.

  During this long period, the Greek ideas inherited from the age of freedom underwent a gradual process of transformation. Some of the old ideas, notably those which we should regard as specifically religious, gained in relative importance; others, more rationalistic, were discarded because they no longer suited the spirit of the age. In this way the later pagans trimmed the Greek tradition until it became suitable for incorporation in Christian doctrine.
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  Christianity popularized an important opinion, already implicit in the teaching of the Stoics, but foreign to the general spirit of antiquity—I mean, the opinion that a man’s duty to God is more imperative than his duty to the State. This opinion—that “we ought to obey God rather than Man,” as Socrates and the Apostles said—survived the conversion of Constantine, because the early Christian emperors were Arians or inclined to Arianism. When the emperors became orthodox, it fell into abeyance. In the Byzantine Empire it remained latent, as also in the subsequent Russian Empire, which derived its Christianity from Constantinople.* But in the West, where the Catholic emperors were almost immediately replaced (except, in parts of Gaul) by heretical barbarian conquerors, the superiority of religious to political allegiance survived, and to some extent still survives.

  The barbarian invasion put an end, for six centuries, to the civilization of western Europe. It lingered in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century; before its extinction there it produced one notable figure, Scotus Erigena. In the Eastern Empire, Greek civilization, in a desiccated form, survived, as in a museum, till the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but nothing of importance to the world came out of Constantinople except an artistic tradition and Justinian’s Codes of Roman law.

  During the period of darkness, from the end of the fifth century to the middle of the eleventh, the western Roman world underwent some very interesting changes. The conflict between duty to God and duty to the State, which Christianity had introduced, took the form of a conflict between Church and king. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Pope extended over Italy, France, and Spain, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and Poland. At first, outside Italy and southern France, his control over bishops and abbots was very slight, but from the time of Gregory VII (late eleventh century) it became real and effective. From that time on, the clergy, throughout western Europe, formed a single organization directed from Rome, seeking power intelligently and relentlessly, and usually victorious, until after the year 1300, in their conflicts with secular rulers. The conflict between Church and State was not only a conflict between clergy and laity; it was also a renewal of the conflict between the Mediterranean world and the northern barbarians. The unity of the Church echoed the unity of the Roman Empire; its liturgy was Latin, and its dominant men were mostly Italian, Spanish, or southern French. Their education, when education revived, was classical; their conceptions of law and government would have been more intelligible to Marcus Aurelius than they were to contemporary monarchs. The Church represented at once continuity with the past and what was most civilized in the present.