Two New Critiques of Monk, and: Monk’s “Pathography”

Abstract

Reviews 77 TWO NEW CRITIQUES OF MONK Ray Monk. Bertrand Russell, [Vol. 2:] The Ghost of Madness, 1921–1970. New York: Free P., 2000. Pp. xvi, 574. MONK’S “PATHOGRAPHY” Timothy Madigan Editorial / U. of Rochester Press Rochester, ny, usa 14620–273 madigan@uofrochesterpress.net few years ago I heard the author Peter Guralnick interviewed on National APublic Radio, discussing the second book of his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Volume 1, Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley (1995), 78 Reviews describes the excitement caused when this young man brought together many disparate musical sources, and the pivotal role he played in changing the very nature of American popular culture. Volume 2, Careless Love: the Unmaking of Elvis Presley (2000), however, is a much sadder tale. It deals with Elvis’s life after his return from a stint in the army, when he made an endless series of awful movies, became a glitzy Las Vegas performer, and overindulged in every human appetite to the point where he became a bloated, incoherent mess and a caricature of his former revolutionary self. Guralnick admitted during the interview that writing the first volume, where he catalogued Elvis’s meteoric rise, had been a pleasure, but writing Volume 2 had been a sad and almost deadening experience, a chore he had to force himself to complete. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this anecdote while reading Ray Monk’s The Ghost of Madness, the second book of his two-volume biography of Russell. Much like Guralnick’s version of Elvis’s life, Monk’s biography bifurcates Russell ’s life very neatly, in this case 1921. In the first volume, The Spirit of Solitude, Monk describes the excitement caused when this young man brought together so many disparate epistemological sources (empiricism, rationalism, and even some mysticism), and the pivotal role he played in changing the very nature of Anglo-American philosophy. The volume ends with Russell at the peak of his powers, married for the second time, with his first child on the way. Obviously, he is ready for a fall. In The Ghost of Madness, Monk clearly agrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein (the subject of his earlier, one-volume biography) that nothing Russell wrote after 1921 was of much worth. Yet Russell lived nearly half a century after this cutoff point. How disturbing it must have been for Monk to force himself to confront the endless litany of potboilers, polemics, and screeds which Russell’s pen produced during those decades. There is not a single work in all of these years that, for Monk, came anywhere near the breathtaking analyses of Russell’s early career, when he attempted the monumental work of proving the logical foundations of mathematics. Even Russell’s later attempts to “get back into the game” by writing such technical works as An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948) fell short of the mark, and were received by most professional philosophers with, at best, polite silence. Like Elvis forcing his overweight body into a gold lamé suit several sizes too small, Russell was unable to recapture the glories of his youth, when his logical analyses were second to none in their sharpness, clarity and precision. This vision of Russell as a washed-up philosopher desperately trying to stay involved has some merit. It is true that Russell himself strictly differentiated his technical from his popular writings, and seemed proudest of the former, recognizing their long-lasting worth. Many of his later works were by their very nature ephemeral, given that they dealt with the specific social and political Reviews 79 issues of the times. They were often dated before they were even published. And the intellectual effort expended on these “potboilers” was nowhere near that which was given to his work on Principia Mathematica. Russell often wished that he could recapture the white-heat days of his earliest efforts. But beginning with the First World War, his own focus switched much more to popular issues, primarily those of war and peace, and he came to look askance at those followers of his—including Wittgenstein—who...