In this blog post, I say that Bertrand Russell was wrong about Thomas Aquinas, that Anthony Kenny was wrong about Bertrand Russell, and that Bertrand Russell was a dishonest hypocrite.
0. Contents
1. What I saw
1.1. Russell’s charge
1.2. Kenny’s answer
1.3. A meme
2. My opinions about what I saw
2.1. Kenny’s answer is inadequate
2.2. Russell’s charge is false
2.3. Russell is a hypocrite
3. Notes
1. What I saw
1.1. Russell’s charge
Bertrand Russell devotes chapter 13 of his History of Western Philosophy specifically to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He ends the chapter by accusing Thomas of being some sort of propagandist:
There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.
1.2. Kenny’s answer
Sir Anthony Kenny thought that this charge was not very serious. In the first chapter of his book Aquinas On Mind, which is meant to answer the question “Why read Aquinas?”[1], he answers it thus:
The other major obstacle to the study of Aquinas outside ecclesiastical institutions has been the belief that his philosophical integrity was compromised by his adhesion to the authority of the Church. If, in advance of any philosophical inquiry, he was committed to a detailed set of beliefs on fundamental issues, surely he was not engaged in any impartial inquiry, following the argument wherever it led, but simply looking for good reasons for what he already believed.
The first thing to be said in response to this allegation is that it is not necessarily a serious charge against a philosopher to say that he is looking for good reasons for what he already believes in. Descartes, for instance, sitting beside his fire wearing his dressing gown, was looking for good reasons for believing that that was what he was doing, and he took a remarkably long time to find them. Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life. [2]
1.3. A meme
Kenny’s rhetorical prowess and defense of Thomas Aquinas have led this last sentence to end up in the following meme, made by the notable Catholic Filipino meme page called Katoliko Memes PH 2:[3]
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2. My opinions about what I saw
2.1. Kenny’s answer is inadequate
I think Kenny has underestimated the seriousness of Russell’s charge. To “find arguments for a conclusion given in advance” really is not philosophy. It is an inversion of proper philosophical method, and the result is a disjointed system where the conclusions are more evident than the principles, which were made up and accepted with the sole purpose of supporting the conclusions. I see no reason to believe that Descartes was doing that, as Kenny says he was. Russell may have been doing that in the Principia Mathematica, but mathematical systems have always been totally arbitrary, and were never meant to be philosophy.
2.2. Russell’s charge is false
Despite being serious, though, the charge is simply false of Thomas Aquinas. Simply being a Christian does not make someone a rhetorician, and Russell gives no reason to believe that Thomas Aquinas was ever thinking backwards. The fact that Thomas rejected the ontological argument for the existence of God, for instance, seems to speak to his honesty, since this would be a waste of effort if he were seeking only to “find apparently rational arguments” for his opinions, rather than to find the truth about his subjects as best he could.
2.3. Russell is a hypocrite
Despite the Principia Mathematica not constituting an example of this, Russell really is guilty of his own charge, as may be shown from the ending of his introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In that introduction, Russell discusses some of Wittgenstein’s opinions. Not wanting to agree with all of them, he advances a hypothesis which might disprove one of Wittgenstein’s arguments. About that hypothesis, he says the following:
Such an hypothesis is very difficult, and I can see objections to it which at the moment I do not know how to answer. Yet I do not see how any easier hypothesis can escape from Mr Wittgenstein’s conclusions. Even if this very difficult hypothesis should prove tenable, it would leave untouched a very large part of Mr Wittgenstein’s theory, though possibly not the part upon which he himself would wish to lay most stress. As one with a long experience of the difficulties of logic and of the deceptiveness of theories which seem irrefutable, I find myself unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that I cannot see any point on which it is wrong.
Now, since Russell is unwilling to accept “the rightness of a theory”, even when he “cannot see any point on which it is wrong”, this shows clearly that he is not willing to “follow wherever the argument may lead” at all. In fact, he proposes a hypothesis, despite its difficulties, with the sole purpose to “escape from Mr Wittgenstein’s conclusions”, which is plainly the “finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance”, namely the denial of Mr Wittgenstein’s conclusions.
This is a perversion of philosophy, and Russell is dishonest for doing it. He is also a hypocrite, since he condemned the same thing in another, who was not even guilty of the charge.
[Addendum 2023-10-06: When I wrote this post, I wasn’t even aware of Russell’s 1907 paper The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics, which defends making up principles for defending desired mathematical conclusions; his hypocrisy went deeper than I had thought.]
3. Notes
[1] I have no idea why books about Thomas Aquinas begin by trying to defend their subject like this. Anyone who is reading has already decided to buy a book about Thomas Aquinas, so just get on with it, no?
[2] The passage is from page 11, and Kenny says more things after it, but they do not matter here.
[3] Clearly “PH” stands for the Philippines. Sometimes their memes reference specific Filipino topics; they are usually in English, but rarely you may also see something in Tagalog. Their memes are generally high quality. They seem to be SSPX sympathizers, but this rarely comes up.
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