The Aristocrat Who Wanted Certainty

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 into one of the most prominent families in British politics. His grandfather had been Prime Minister twice. He was orphaned at three, raised by his puritanical grandmother, and desperately lonely as a child. At the age of eleven, he encountered Euclidean geometry, and the experience was, by his own account, as overwhelming as first love.

Here, finally, was certainty. Here were truths that did not depend on opinion, authority, or the shifting loyalties of adults. If the axioms were true, the theorems followed necessarily. Russell decided that he would do for all of mathematics what Euclid had done for geometry — ground it in logic, prove its foundations were solid, and establish once and for all that mathematical truth was real.

This project consumed the next decade of his life and produced, with Alfred North Whitehead, the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910-1913). It took 362 pages to prove that 1+1=2. The proof is on page 379 of Volume I, and Russell added, drily, that the proposition is "occasionally useful."

The Paradox That Ruined Everything

Before he could finish the Principia, Russell discovered something that nearly destroyed his own project. In 1901, he was examining set theory — the mathematical foundation he was building on — and he asked a seemingly innocent question: consider the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does it contain itself?

If it does, then by definition it does not. If it does not, then by definition it does. This is Russell's Paradox, and it is not a word game. It revealed a fundamental contradiction at the base of set theory, which meant the foundation Russell was trying to build on had a crack running through it.

Russell spent years trying to patch the crack. He developed the Theory of Types, a complex workaround that most mathematicians found inelegant. Then in 1931, Kurt Godel proved that any consistent mathematical system complex enough to include arithmetic would necessarily contain true statements that could not be proved within the system. The dream of complete logical certainty — Russell's dream since he was eleven — was mathematically impossible (Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1996).

The Philosopher Who Would Not Shut Up

What Russell did after logic failed him is arguably more impressive than the logic itself. He pivoted to philosophy, education, politics, and public activism with an energy that was extraordinary even by the standards of Victorian polymaths.

He was imprisoned in 1918 for opposing World War I. He was fired from Trinity College Cambridge. He ran for Parliament (twice, losing both times). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his philosophical writings. At the age of eighty-nine, he was arrested again — this time for leading anti-nuclear protests in London. The police photograph of the elderly earl being carried away by bobbies became one of the iconic images of the 1960s peace movement.

Russell lived to ninety-seven, wrote over seventy books, married four times, had numerous affairs, and maintained until the end that the most important qualities a person could possess were intellectual honesty and a willingness to change one's mind in the face of evidence. He called himself a passionate skeptic — passionate about truth, skeptical of anyone who claimed to have found it permanently (Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1967-1969).

He wanted certainty at eleven. By ninety-seven, he had learned to live beautifully without it.