Today May 18 2015 is Bertrand Russell's 143rd Birth Anniversary.
Ray Monk writes:
"...“Thinking in pictures,” Sigmund Freud once wrote, “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.” There is, in other words, something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually.
Such a view is anathema to many philosophers, a good many of whom believe that all thought is propositional, that to think is to use words. For some of the most distinguished philosophers in history, thinking and verbalising were practically the same thing. Bertrand Russell sometimes to his great frustration, was hopeless at visualising and was more or less indifferent to the visual arts. His mental life seemed almost entirely made up of words rather than images. When his friend Rupert Crawshay-Williams once gave him an intelligence test that involved matching increasingly complicated geometrical shapes, Russell did extremely well up to a certain point and then exceptionally badly after that. “What happened?” Crawshay-Williams asked. “I hadn’t got any names for the shapes,” Russell replied...."
It's ironic that a well-received, best-selling comic novel has been produced on such a man!
John Gray:
“In his letter
commenting on Russell’s book on China, Conrad wrote: ‘I have never been able to
find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything convincing enough to stand up
for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this
man-inhabited world.’ Russell’s passionate admiration for Conrad may have had a
number of sources. One of them was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical
fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in
reason and science. As reformer, he believed reason could save the world. As a
skeptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of
the passions. Sceptical Essays was written as a defence of rational doubt.
Today we can read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading
rationalist who doubted the power of reason.”
Ray Monk writes:
"...“Thinking in pictures,” Sigmund Freud once wrote, “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.” There is, in other words, something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually.
Such a view is anathema to many philosophers, a good many of whom believe that all thought is propositional, that to think is to use words. For some of the most distinguished philosophers in history, thinking and verbalising were practically the same thing. Bertrand Russell sometimes to his great frustration, was hopeless at visualising and was more or less indifferent to the visual arts. His mental life seemed almost entirely made up of words rather than images. When his friend Rupert Crawshay-Williams once gave him an intelligence test that involved matching increasingly complicated geometrical shapes, Russell did extremely well up to a certain point and then exceptionally badly after that. “What happened?” Crawshay-Williams asked. “I hadn’t got any names for the shapes,” Russell replied...."
It's ironic that a well-received, best-selling comic novel has been produced on such a man!
courtesy: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, 2009
Authors: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
Art: Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna