Bertie's Politics of Logic

The politics of logic: Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism

In Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Russell sought to model "a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy."

Bernard Bosanquet, an ageing titan of British idealism, called his November 1914, inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session, ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s book.

"Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essence if it were to lose its national quality’. British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans."
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"The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks prior to Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which evidently are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.’"
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"Russell’s suggestion is that ethical philosophy offers little more than self-serving argument to justify nationalistic violence. What is more, Russell had held up Bosanquet himself as an example of the kind of moralising metaphysics he meant to repudiate. In private, Russell referred to the essay as ‘Philosophers and Pigs’.

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered in the midst of the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it."
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Russell's theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy....
Russell didn’t intend logic to become the language of literature and poetry, much less to destroy those practices. But he very much intended his ‘scientific’ methodology to destroy a conception of philosophy as an articulation of a ‘national mind’.

The connection between Russell’s antinationalism and his metaphilosophy comes out sharply in his political writing of the era. In April 1915, he was again railing against the role philosophers were playing in promoting nationalism:

Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of ‘this war, in which philosophy takes no interest’. … We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other … I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to colour their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs: it is in its essence neutral.

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The UK entered the war August 4th, 1914. By the end of the week, the House of Commons passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which gave the government broad wartime powers – including censorship. In 1916, Russell would be dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge, following his conviction under DORA (and thanks in part to a campaign at the university led by another British idealist, J M E McTaggart). Russell spent six months in jail for his outspoken pacifism.

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_entry_into_World_War_I .