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Being" and the social hierarchy of feudalism. The doctrine of "analogy,"
a key to the medieval mind and culture, is not even mentioned. The
statement of interconnection between modern science and philosophies
is left suspended; even such major root systems as those which ground
so much epistemology in Galileo's preferred categories are unaccounted.
Russell's inability to think and feel historically turns some of the
accounts of individual philosophies into rather silly cartoons. The chapter
on Augustine is a painful example.
"Next
comes the question of pious
virgins who were raped during the sack [of Rome]. There were ap–
parently some who held that those ladies, by no fault of their own, had
lost the crown of virginity. This view the Saint very sensibly opposes....
It
is suggested that God permitted rapes because the victims had been
too proud of their continence.... There is one proviso to the exculpa–
tion of virtuous women who are raped: they must not enjoy it.
If
they
do, they are sinful." There are pages of this sort of thing as the essay on
the philosopher who in all probability was, historically, the most in–
fluential that ever lived; and who, in any case, more fully than any
other expresses the crisis between two civilizations. Russell, it is revealing
to observe, treats seriously only Augustine's views on space and time–
views of technical importance, possibly, to a practising metaphysician,
but of almost no
historical
significance.
Nevertheless, Russell's lack of a historical sense is not altogether
displeasing. The genetic and historical approach, nowadays a common–
place for school children, gets sometimes rather boring. Russell doesn't
really feel that either he or other philosophers are in their writings and
careers expressions of social relations or psychic impulses. In his
History,
which is not a history, he is meeting his peers, his friends and rivals,
at a timeless symposium, arguing over the port in the senior common
room, located perhaps in a wing of that Noble Castle which Dante, by
his sole gracious gesture, provides even in eternal Hell for the
spiriti
magni.
At its best, the record is lively and even charming. How cross Russell
gets at a bad argument, or worse still, a refusal to argue at all. How
pleased he occasionally is to be able to agree with a contemporary of
two thousand years ago, to give him, sometimes, a friendly pat for a good
try with insufficient material. How absurd, from a historical point of
view, to get into a rage because Socrates or Augustine or Hegel or
Bergson responds so sensitively to his own time and his own psyche.
But how refreshing to see rejected that devaluation of all values which
is the result of extreme historicism.
Russell knows, I suppose, that the implications of parts of his own
analyses of logic and meaning require the dismissal of all or almost all
the great philosophical problems as cognitively meaningless. "Between
theology and science t!-lere is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from
