LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 14

LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER

HUMAN SOCIETY IN ETHICS AND POLITICS, by Bertrand Russell; George Allen and Unwin, English price 15/-. N_ the first part of this book Lord Russell sets forth an "undogmatic ethic’; and in the second part he applies his ethic to contemporary problems in politics. He is at some pains to refute the allegation that he overastimates . the function of reason in human affairs. The causes of action, he says, are desires, emotions, passions. Reason is "only a regulator": it signifies the choice of right means to an end, but "has nothing whatever to do with the choice of ends." The lay thinker, unversed in philosophical distinctions, may find it hard to believe that judgments of value can be so firmly separated from experience. Is not the choice of ends a rational process in so far as it is influenced by what has been learnt in trying to resolve conflicts between competing desires? There is, however, no difficulty in seeing what Russell himself believes to be bad. He hates cruelty, intolerance, and the authoritarian temper; and he looks searchingly at some popular notions of sin. "Most stern moralists,’ he says, "are in the habit of thinking of pleasure as only of the senses, and, when they eschew the pleasures of sense, they do not notice that the pleasures of power, which to men of their temperament are far more attractive, have not been brought within the ban of their ascetic self-denial." The book suffers a little from the way in which it was written-part of it in 1945-6, and the rest after a lapse of seven years. Yet it contains much wisdom and a wit that is quite irrepressible. Russell is a philosopher who likes to laugh, sometimes a little wryly, at the human situation; and in his breadth of interest and humanity he stands alone among contemporary thinkers. The inclusion of one chapter, "Politically Important Ideas," is perhaps a little arbitrary; but this was the text of his Stockholm lecture, given when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and few readers would want to miss a sparkling performance-though some may have heard it when the lecture was broadcast

recently from ZB stations.

H.