TB: Mysticism and Logic (Russell)
Core Thesis
Philosophers have always felt the need for both science and mysticism. Russell argues that mysticism is best understood as an attitude toward life — a way of approaching experience with openness and wonder — not as a set of claims about the world. Science, not mysticism, is the path to truth about the world; but both coexist in a well-formed mind.
Key Takeaways
Mysticism as attitude, not creed
- Mysticism is to be commended as an attitude toward life, not as a creed about the world.
- Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.
- Instinct is least likely to err in practical matters that aid in survival — but it is only through the intellect that we know about the struggle for survival at all.
Science and objectivity
- Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distortion of their own desires.
- Scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit.
- The mere fact of living is not to be desired — but the art of living in contemplation of great things is.
Mathematics and infinity
- The solution of difficulties surrounding the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest intellectual achievement of Russell's age (Cantor).
- Cantor showed it is not true that removing something from a collection always makes it smaller — this removes the paradoxes and makes an exact science of the infinite.
- Math can be defined as the subject in which we never know what we're talking about, nor whether what we're saying is true.
- Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness.
- All of arithmetic and algebra require only 3 indefinable notions and 5 indemonstrable propositions.
Free will and determinism
- You cannot alter the past, but you can also not make the future other than it will be.
- Our present wishes are conditioned by the past and therefore could not be different unless the past were different.
Mental Models
- The Map is Not the Territory — Russell's demarcation: mysticism may be a valid attitude (map) but is not a reliable guide to the territory