Bertrand russel - how to grow old

Bertrand Russel

How to grow old

In this passage Bertrand Russel gives us some "suggestion" about "how to grow old and eventually die".

Psychologically there  are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of those is too great an absorption in the past. One should not live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead. One's thoughts must be directed to future, and to things about which there is something to be done. This is not always easy; one's own past is gradually increasing weight. It is easy to think to oneself that one's emotions used to be more vivid than they are, and one's mind more keen. If this is true it should be forgotten, and if it is forgotten it will probably not be true.

The other thing to be avoided is clinging to youth in the hope of finding strength in its vitality. When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives; and if you continue to be as interested in them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden to them, unless they are usually insensible. I do not mean that one should be without interests in them, but one's interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic, but not too emotional. Animals become indifferent to their young as soon as their young can look after themselves, but human beings, owing to the length of infancy, find this less easy.

I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests leading to suitable activities. It is in this sphere that long experience is really fruitful; and that the wisdom born of experience can be used without becoming a burden. It is no use telling grown-up children not to make mistakes, both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren. In that case you must realise that while you can still help them in material ways, as by making them an allowance or knitting them jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.

Some old people are troubled  by fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has done whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat ignoble. The best way to overcome it - al least it seems to me- is to make your interest gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly part of the universal life. An individual human exisistence should be like a river small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the water flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become part of the sea, and painless lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the loss of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

B. Russel, How to grow old, from New Hopes for a Changing World, Only Connect Maps, Zanichelli,1997)

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Brainstorming

Use this text to brainstorm your knowledge/experience about the subject of adult age, old age and death.

Focus on the source of the document.

Discuss its view on the issue.

Define its mood.

Say if you find its  language effective.

Justify your answer.

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About Bertrand Russel (1872-1970)

British philosopher, mathematician and social critic, one of the most widely read philosophers of this century. Bertrand Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. In his memoirs he mentions that he formed in 1895 a plan to 'write one series of books on the philosophy of the sciences from pure mathematics to physiology, and another series of books on social questions. I hoped that the two series might ultimately meet in a synthesis at once scientific and practical.'

Bertrand Russel was born in Trelleck, Wales, as the second son of Viscount Amberley. His mother, Katherine, was the daughter of Baron Stanley of Aderley. She died of diphtheria in 1874 and her husband a twenty months later. At the age of three Russell was an orphan. He was brought up by his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who had been prime minister twice, and Lady John.

Inspired by Euclid's Geometry, Russell displayed a keen aptitude for pure mathematics and developed an interest in philosophy. At Trinity College, Cambridge, his brilliance was soon recognized, and brought him a membership of the 'Apostles', a forerunner of the Bloomsbury Set.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1894, Russell worked briefly at the British Embassy in Paris as honorary attaché. Next year he became a fellow of Trinity College. Against his family's wishes, Russell married an American Quaker, Alys Persall Smith, and went off with his wife to Berlin, where he studied economics and gathered data for the first of his ninety-odd books, German Social Democracy (1896). A year later came out Russell's fellowship dissertation, Essay On The Foundations On Geometry (1897).

The Principles Of Mathematics (1903) was Russell's first major work, inspired by the mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). It proposed that the foundations of mathematics could be deduced from a few logical ideas; that mathematic is a continuation of logic and that its subject-matter is a system of Platonic essences that exist in the realm outside both mind and matter.

After that Russell wrote Principia Mathematica (1910-13), in collaboration with the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. According to them, philosophy should limit itself to simple, objective accounts of phenomena. Empirical knowledge was the only path to truth and all other knowledge was subjective and misleading (however, later Russell became sceptical of the empirical method as the sole means for ascertaining the truth).

After Principia Russell never again worked intensively in mathematics. His interpretation of numbers as classes of classes gave him much trouble, thus, after discussions with Wittgenstein, he accepted the view that mathematical statements are tautologies, no truths about a realm of logico-mathematical entities.

Russell's concise and original introductory book, The Problems Of Philosophy, appeared in 1912. He continued with works on epistemology, Mysticism And Logic (1918) and Analysis And Mind (1921). In 1905 he wrote the paper On denoting which was the foundation of much twentieth-century philosophizing about language.

In 1907 Russell stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Women's Suffragate Society, and next year he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Believing that inherited wealth was immoral, Russell gave most of his money away to his university. His marriage ended when he began a lengthy affair with the literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell. Other liaisons followed, among others with T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood. Later Russell wrote about his sexual morality and agnosticism in Marriage And Morals (1929). Russell stated that human beings are not naturally monogamous, outraging many with his views. In 1927 Russell wrote in Why I Am Not A Christian that all organized religions are the residue of the barbaric past, dwindled to hypocritical superstitions that have no basis in reality.

At the outbreak of World War I, Russell was outspoken pacifist, which lost him his fellowship in 1916. Two years later he served six months in prison, convicted of libelling an ally - the American army - in a Tribune article. While in Brixton Gaol, he worked on Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy (1919). World War I darkened Russell's view of human nature. 'I learned an understanding of instinctive processes which I had not possessed before.'

Russell visited Russia in 1920 with a Labour Party delegation and met Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, but returned deeply disillusioned and published his sharp critic The Practice And Theory Of Bolshevism (1920).

From about 1927 to 1938 Russell lived by lecturing and writing on a huge range of popular subjects. He pursued his philosophical work in The Analysis Of Mind (1921) and The Analysis Of Matter (1927). Between the years 1920 and 1921 he was professor at Peking and in 1927 he started with his former student and second wife Dora Black a progressive school at Beacon Hill, on the Sussex Downs. In On Education (1926) Russell called for an education that would liberate the child from unthinking obedience to parental and religious authority. The experiment at Beacon Hill lasted for five years and gave material to the book Education And Social Order (1932).

In 1936 Russell married Patricia Spence, who had been his research assistant on his political history Freedom And Organization (1934).

In 1938 he moved to the United States, returning to academic philosophical work. He was a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and later at City College, New York, where he was debarred from teaching because of libertarian opinions about sexual morals, education, and war. In the united states Russell wrote one of his most popular works, History Of Western Philosophy (1945).

Its success permanently ended his financial difficulties and earned him the Nobel Prize. In 1944 Russell returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of his old college, Trinity.

During the Second World War Russell abandoned his pacifism, but in the final decades of his life Russell became the leading figure in the antinuclear weapons movement. From 1950 to his death Russell was extremely active in political campaigning. He established Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in 1964, supported the Jews in Russia and the Arabs in Palestine and condemned the Vietnam War. In his family life Russell had his own tragedies: his son and his granddaughters suffered from schizophrenia.

Retaining his ability to cause debate, Russell was imprisoned in 1961 with his fourth and final wife Edith Finch for taking part in a demonstration in Whitehall. The sentence was reduced on medical grounds to seven days in Brixton Prison. His last years Russell spent in North Wales.

His later works include Human Knowledge: Its Scope And Limits (1948), two collections of sardonic fables, Satan In The Suburb (1953) and Nightmares Of Eminent Persons (1954), and The Autobiography Of Bertrand Russell (1967-69, 3 vols.), in which he stated: 'Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.' Russell died of influenza on February 2, 1970.

Though Russell was a pioneer of logical positivism, which was further developed by such philosophers from 'Vienna circle' as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap, he never identified himself fully with the group. In Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits Russell argued that while the data of sense are mental, they are caused by physical events. The world is a vast collection of facts and events, but beyond the laws of their occurrence science cannot go, it only gives us knowledge of the world.

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