World Cup Wishes

From: ‘Metamorphoses: Great Minds who Changed their Mind’, an unfinished philosophy thesis by Yuval Freed

In April 1901, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his spouse are staying with their friends, the Whiteheads, in their mansion in Oxford. In the evening, the Russells go out and when they return, they find, to their horror, that Mrs Whitehead is lying on the sofa in the throes of an attack of severe pain. She is curled up like a foetus, moaning. Then, she writhes for several seconds and curls up again. Russell wants to go to her, to help her. But Mr Whitehead stops him. Nothing can be done, he explains. It’s Evelyn’s heart disease. We have to wait for it to pass.

As he stands there watching the woman moaning on the sofa, Russell experiences a dramatic internal change (he himself uses the religious term ‘conversion’ when he describes the event in his autobiography). In sharp contrast to other developments his thinking had undergone over time, the conversion that occurred that night was not preceded by tightly reasoned logic; nor was it supported by precise formulas. The ground, as he himself writes, is simply pulled out from under his feet during those five minutes he stands watching Mrs Whitehead’s suffering, and suddenly — according to his own testimony — he understands everything: he understands that the human soul is infinitely alone in its pain. And that that loneliness is unbearable. He understands that the only way to penetrate and touch that private loneliness is through unconditional love of the sort clerics preach, and that any act that is not derived from such love is harmful and pointless. This leads him to the conclusion (it is amusing to see that Russell’s apparently mystic flow of thought here actually evolves logically, almost like a mathematical proof) that war is evil, that public school education is disgraceful, that all use of force is to be condemned, and that in interpersonal relations, a person must penetrate the core of another’s loneliness and speak to it.

For several months after that event, Russell felt that he had had an epiphany and that he was able to read the innermost thoughts of anyone he met on the street. Those mystic feelings faded with time, but he never forgot that moment in the Whitehead home, and he claimed that it lay at the root of his shift from imperialism to pacifism. The same Russell who grew up in a family of political conservatives and, from earliest childhood, absorbed the belief in the supreme importance of preserving the great British Empire, that same Russell who, only two years earlier, in 1899, had wholeheartedly wished for Britain’s victory in the cruel war to suppress the Boers in South Africa, became in five minutes, so he claimed, a pacifist who championed conscientious objectors, and later, preached against Britain’s participation in the First World War …