What the Swedes Read: Bertrand Russell

• LAUREATE: Bertrand Russell (Great Britain, 1950)
• BOOK READ: Sceptical Essays

In discussing Bertrand Russell, one of the few philosophers awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I’d like to begin with a philosophical question, namely this: why is literature that is determined to face head-on the biggest questions the universe has to offer, without any complications of metaphor or narrative, too often written in loopy gobbledygook? Why do they do that to us? Are philosophers not setting out to make us feel clearer about something? And if they are, would it be possible to write it in a style that doesn’t force me to lean over the page holding both eyes open like the guy in A Clockwork Orange? I mean, here’s the first sentence of Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, one of the absolute classics of philosophy.

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

I’ve read this book. I’ve found value in this book. And yet, sheesh, what’s with the style? I mean how about just putting it like this:

Being human brings up inevitable and unanswerable questions.

And that’s just off the top of my head! You might say that any book published in the late eighteenth century is going to have some troublesome language, to which I say:

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons.

This is the opener of the first chapter of a book published fifty years earlier: Gulliver’s Travels, a book full of punchy, vivid philosophical points. Jonathan Swift will make you ask questions. With Immanuel Kant, the question is first going to be “What are you talking about?” And when I say, “What are you talking about?” I don’t mean “What is the subject matter preoccupying Immanuel Kant in his immense, classic work?” I mean it the way anyone asks that question. Like if I said, “World War I was caused by pies,” you’d say, “What are you talking about?”

Here’s what Bertrand Russell has to say about World War I:

Another way in which good men can be useful is by getting themselves murdered… The Archduke who was murdered at Sarajevo was, I believe, a good man; and how grateful we ought to be to him! If he had not died as he did, we might not have had the war, and then the world would not have been made safe for democracy, nor would militarism have been overthrown, nor should...