"[Unlike the] utilitarian... I judge pleasure and pain to be of small importance compared to knowledge, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue."
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
"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. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish."
Russell's autobiography opens with the most quoted self-summary in modern philosophy, and the famous sentence is half right about its author. While the three passions were certainly real, the actual record shows a solitary and principled analyst whose character and method were remarkably constant for ninety-eight years. He definitely was an LII, maybe with a slight ILE accent at best.
The decisive exhibit is Principia Mathematica. It was Russell who came up with the notion that all of mathematics could be reduced to pure logic, and labored under that notion for some ten years, during which he wrote thousands of pages of formal derivation, in a regime of sustained abstract intellectual labor. His private life during those years, by his own account, was "bleak and joyless", but he still worked on. The patient construction of the underlying logical structure, at real personal cost (he believed the effort permanently damaged his capacity for difficult abstract work — the sound of a base function pushed to its absolute limit) is quite typical. The book was written, as one reviewer put it, "with all the precision and lucidity of which the language is capable." Russell's Paradox, found while auditing Frege's life-work, is the LII's signature gift operating at the highest level ever recorded: the instant logical detection of the error no one else could see, in a structure everyone else trusted.
Russell was definitely a social introvert. His childhood at Pembroke Lodge was isolated and inward. The famous "conversion" episode of 1901 crystallized around the conviction that "the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable". Reviewers of his candid autobiography noticed that he seems removed from those most close to him. The emblem is the end of his first marriage: out bicycling one afternoon, he "suddenly realised" he no longer loved Alys, an insight arriving like one of his logical results, complete and irreversible, and the marriage was thereafter administered to its conclusion with chilling matter-of-factness. It is indeed often difficult for an LII to have much interest in the particular people nearby. The "unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind" was entirely real, but abstract, in the "ascending", Ti-Fe manner. It engaged at the scale of mankind, war, the bomb, the species, where his strong functions could grip it.
The terms of his second marriage with Dora Black (ESE with some sort of EIE accent? really, more analysis is needed here, but she was certainly passionate and child-loving, while being a touch more ideological than a typical ESE) were explicit: mutual liberty, no jealousy, marriage as rational partnership stripped of possessive superstition. The failure of this shows how weak ethics ambushed him twice, in opposite directions: with Alys it showed as the absence of feeling where feeling was owed, with Dora it showed as the eruption of feeling where his system had declared none would occur (it reached a breaking point over her having two children with an American journalist, Griffin Barry, which was explicitly permitted in their contract). His third marriage fared no better. Only the fourth one was a success.
As common for the type, Russell's engagements were, from first to last, principled to the point of self-damage. He went to prison in 1918 rather than soften his opposition to the war, and lost his lectureship for it; he went back to jail at eighty-nine, sitting on pavement with the nuclear disarmers; at ninety-four he was convening a war-crimes tribunal. Each was a position reasoned to and then paid for. He is the selfless-idealist pole of the introverted-logical band made flesh: he analyst who, after arriving at the idea, implements it to his own detriment, in the face of his own advantage as an individual of his class (grandson of a prime minister). The famous line, "I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong", is usually quoted as flippancy, but it is the typical LII epistemology from a man who twice went to prison for his beliefs anyway: total commitment to the conclusion as derived, but not to its infallibility.
Typically for LII, Russell was interested in global political issues. The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed is quite perceptive in its analysis. The myth he punctures (he warned of a growing tendency where the identification of someone as a victim was not only used to elicit sympathy but to proclaim their moral superiority) was the cherished property of his own political side — he was a lifelong man of the left demolishing the left's favorite sentimentality, just as he debunked his own class's pieties. And it shows how an LII can be perceptive about ethical-emotional phenomena despite weak ethics in the lived, particular sense — he wasn't particularly attentive to the individual subjectivities of people he interacted with, but moral sentiment as an object of analysis, as a pattern with causes and functions, was fully within reach of his strong IM's.
Born into a great Whig dynasty, he attacked the religion of his nation, the conventions of his class, and the policy of every government he lived under, and, in an Alpha-NT style, seemed puzzled that any group expected his loyalty merely for having claimed him. On this cognitive-and-values axis of novelty, pluralism, multivariance, heresy, Russell resembles Ram Mohan Roy. A wayward course, he called his life, but the waywardness was all in the conclusions; the mind that reached them was the same mind throughout: solitary, lucid, incorruptibly precise, finding the flaw in every structure including its own beliefs, and acting on the result no matter what it cost.
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