A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Rating: 3/5, average

“Many histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a case of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished.” – Bertrand Russell

I was a literature major in college, and in every class we would do close reading: we would examine the nuances of every word choice and try to squeeze every drop of meaning we could out of it. When we did this, we were not just trying to understand the book, but the author. We took hints scattered throughout the text, and used them to deconstruct, analyze, and interpret the author’s worldview.

In fiction, an author’s worldview is illustrated by the scenario, but also obscured by it. I’ve never read philosophy before, so I wanted to see what it was like to encounter a developed worldview, straight, without the scenario. I was also curious to see if philosophy might be a system by which different authors could be organized and sorted into a kind of mental web of meaning.

With that in mind, I picked up A History of Western Philosophy (from 5th Avenue Books in San Diego, which sadly isn’t in business anymore). A History of Western Philosophy is 800 pages long and it can be a little dry. It took me about three years to read, as I’d put it down, and then come back to it. It focuses more on the history of Western civilization than on the philosophical ideas, which sets a good groundwork for understanding the philosophy, but it doesn’t get too deep into the philosophies themselves. It’s a decent introduction, but I think there’s likely to be a shorter one out there that could get you up to speed faster. This is the first philosophy book I’ve read, so I can’t speak to its accuracy, but Bertrand Russell is a famous philosopher himself, so I thought it would be a good place to start.

The book begins with Thales, the first Greek philosopher, and goes all the way to John Dewey, Russell’s contemporary. Each chapter consists of Russell introducing a philosopher, movement, or time period, and then giving his judgment of the strengths and weaknesses of that philosophy. This follows his description of the ideal way to read philosophy from the chapter on Heraclitus:

“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.”

The best thing about studying philosophy is learning how to develop this kind of mental flexibility. There are a lot of people who think in terms of right and wrong, without questioning the criteria they use to determine right from wrong. Philosophy goes beyond discussions of “What is moral?” into discussions of different moralities. Recognizing that multiple systems of values even exist helps you immensely in  trying to understand the world. Each way you learn to think adds another tool to your mental toolkit, which you can use to empathize with and persuade people, or to solve problems from multiple directions.

I think the philosophers that have the most to teach us are the ones whose philosophies are wildly different from our learned assumptions. For me, the one that contradicted my assumptions the most in A History of Western Philosophy was Thomas Hobbes. I grew up in the U.S. and my father is a libertarian, so I’ve internalized a lot of anti-authoritarianism. Freedom is always good, right? Not if you’re Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes’s teachings are the complete opposite of what we in American society have been taught to value. When I was reading his chapter, I often wondered, “How can someone think like this?” In Leviathan, Hobbes says that the state of nature is a “war of all against all” and an absolute monarch is needed to keep everything in order. This sounds overly pessimistic, but as Russell explains, Hobbes lived through the English Civil War and saw first-hand the strife that ensues when government loses the ability to protect/control its people. Hobbes’s embrace of authoritarian government was an attempt to secure peace and protect human life.

The unique thing about A History of Western Philosophy is that it’s presented in chronological order, so it feels like a giant story from the pre-Socratics up until now. It makes you feel connected to the past, as you see how each generation influenced the next and how our generation is the culmination of all that came before it. There were a lot of funny anecdotes about the philosophers that made them seem more human and relatable (and sometimes villainous, like Rousseau, who was a ruthless manipulator of people, and Schopenhauer, who once threw an old woman down the stairs). My favorite was the one about how Descartes joined the army to get away from his friends and would write in a chimney so people would leave him alone (taking introversion to the extreme!). There were also a lot of violent events that make the present time seem less crazy by comparison, like the lynching of Hypatia, a female Greek mathematician.

Reading an intro to philosophy book is good for making a list of topics and philosophers you want to check out in more detail. Here’s what made my list, in the order I’ll try reading them: Hobbes’s Leviathan, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Stoics, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Orphics, Epicurus, Epictetus, Descartes, Hegel, Plato, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx. If that is too confusing, I’ll start in the normal order with Plato and Aristotle, but those were the titles that interested me the most from Russell’s descriptions of them.

The book was published in 1945, so it only covers up to about the 1930s. It got a lot of criticism when it came out for leaving out Heidegger and for giving too much of a personal opinion of each of the philosophers. That’s a fair criticism. It’s not really the most objective, and it left me feeling like I should find another more textbook-like philosophy book to get a more objective take on it. Still, I enjoyed Russell’s dry humor and the warmth of the writing. I don’t regret the time I spent reading it, but I think there’s probably a better introduction to philosophy out there, so I’m giving it a 3/5.

Edit: I found this great list of philosophy books for beginners. It suggests Plato’s Republic and Dialogues, Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (free on Kindle!), and At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell, which is an accessible introduction to the French existentialists.