A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Libraries shows how a British philosopher can impress and possibly influence a top Thai thinker. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell is about a a British philosopher, mathematician, and writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Russell lived a long time, dying in 1970 at age 97. He was a clear and often humorous writer, so his books, even when dealing with serious subjects such as the history of philosophy, physics, or nuclear warfare, can be surprisingly witty. Throughout his long life, Russell did not write what people may have expected him to write, or do what was expected of him. A firm believer in peace and against war, Russell was arrested at the age of 89 and put in jail for a week in London’s Brixton Prison for participating in a street demonstration against nuclear war. The judge offered to let him go home and not spend time in jail if Russell would swear to obey the rules of “good behavior,” but Russell answered, “No, I won’t,” and he was sent to jail. Despite such adventures, Russell is mainly remembered today as a thinker. He once summed up his career by writing that when he became too stupid for mathematics, he took to philosophy, and when he realized that he was too stupid to do philosophy any more, he started to write fiction. Like many of Russell’s statements, this can be read as partly humorous, but also serious. In analytic philosophy, Russell coauthored Principia Mathematica to try to create a logical basis for mathematics. Students of mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics still encounter Russell’s name today. Yet he was perhaps most influential in his attempts to persuade people that a subject such as mathematics was not dry and boring, but about beautiful things. He wrote in Mysticism and Logic:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Because of his anti-nuclear war beliefs, in his nineties Russell appeared in a Bollywood film, Aman (1967), about Dr. Gautamdas a UK-trained Indian doctor who volunteers to go to Japan to help treat patients still suffering from the results of the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. In one scene of the film, Russell encourages the doctor in his humanitarian mission.
Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen, Reader of Bertrand Russell.
A copy of the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell was generously donated to the Thammasat University Libraries by Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen, and is currently shelved in the Adul Wichiencharoen Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library. In addition to its value as a text, the book also has an added interest that is sometimes found in books from private libraries. Marginalia is an old Latin term meaning notes written in the margins of a text. Sometimes famous authors wrote all over the books in their personal collections, although of course it is seen as very inconsiderate and destructive to write on books that belong to public or university collections. These marginalia can be extensive comments or limited to check marks and underlinings to show that a certain passage of a book was of special interest to the reader. These more subtle and discreet forms of marginalia are what Ajarn Adul added to his own personal copy of the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, as we may see today. Among the marks in pencil, on page 19 there is a vertical line next to a passage in which Russell describes his childhood home, Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, Richmond upon Thames, London, with
eleven acres of garden, mostly allowed to run wild. This garden played a very large part in my life up to the age of eighteen. To the west there was an enormous view extending from the Epsom Downs (which I believed to be the ‘Ups and Downs’) to Windsor Castle, with Hindhead and Leith Hill between. I grew accustomed to wide horizons and to an unimpeded view of the sunset. And I have never since been able to live happily without both. There were many fine trees, oaks, beeches, horse- and Spanish chesnuts, and lime trees, a very beautiful cedar tree, cryptomerias and deodaras presented by Indian princes. There were summer-houses, sweet briar hedges, thickets of laurel, and all kinds of secret places in which it was possible to hide from grown-up people so successfully that there was not the slightest fear of discovery.
Clearly Ajarn Adul, who has enjoyed life in a rural setting in Thailand for many years, was struck by the need of Russell to also live in the middle of nature. There are three large checks next to a passage on page 21 about Russell’s Uncle William who once told the boy
that the human capacity for enjoyment decreases with the years and that I should never again enjoy a summer’s day as much as the one that was now ending. I burst into floods of tears and continued to weep long after I was in bed.
Possibly as a reader, Ajarn Adul felt the need not to disillusion youngsters with negative or gloomy remarks about their future as adults. Russell himself added about his uncle’s prediction:
Subsequent experience has shown me that his remark was as untrue as it was cruel. The grown-ups with whom I came in contact had a remarkable incapacity for understanding the intensity of childish emotions. When, at the age of four, I was taken to be photographed in Richmond, the photographer had difficulty in getting me to sit still, and at last promised me a sponge cake if I would remain motionless. I had, until that moment, only had one sponge cake in all my life and it had remained as a high point of ecstasy. I therefore stayed as quiet as a mouse and the photograph was wholly successful. But I never got the sponge cake.
When Russell recounts his years as a young adult and early involvement in politics, Ajarn Adul may have related them to his own years of devoted governmental service, protecting the culture and natural wonders of the Kingdom. On page 72 Russell describes a speech given by the economist John Maynard Keynes in the House of Lords where the speaker convinced his audience:
Many of them had been doubtful beforehand, but when he had finished there remained hardly any doubters except Lord Beaverbrook and two cousins of mine with a passion for being in the minority.
The words with a passion for being in the minority are checked and underlined, and it is possible that Ajarn Adul was thinking of people he had met who shared the enjoyment of being in opposition to general thinking as an overall approach to public life and thought. Russell’s words about his education may have had special significance for Ajarn Adul. Russell mentions on page 74 the importance of his education at Cambridge University in his intellectual life:
Most of what I learned in philosophy has come to seem to me erroneous, and I spent many subsequent years in gradually unlearning the habits of thought which I had there acquired.
The words unlearning the habits of thought which I had there acquired are checked in the margin and underlined. Even if this precise experience of learning was not shared by Ajarn Adul, he may have felt it was an interesting way to describe the process of education and how long it sometimes takes to get over the impression of early lessons. As an adult, Russell’s travels and experiences also interested Ajarn Adul, such as on page 76:
To me, as to Goethe, America seemed a romantic land of freedom, and I found among them an absence of many prejudices which hampered me at home. Above all, I enjoyed their emancipation from good taste.
The words I enjoyed their emancipation from good taste are underlined and checked. Ajarn Adul spent several years earning a Ph.D. at Georgetown University (1951-1952) and the American University in Washington, D.C. (1952-1953) where he may have also noticed that Americans were not as worried about behaving tastefully as the more modest Thai youngsters he had grown up with. Some reflections by Russell as a mature thinker are also highlighted by Ajarn Adul. On page 104, Russell wrote to his wife in 1894:
I feel a real and solid pleasure when anybody points out a fallacy in any of my views, because I care much less about my opinions than about their being true.
The words I care much less about my opinions than about their being true are checked and underlined. It is likely that Ajarn Adul agreed with this feeling expressed by Russell, since people who have worked with him over the years have described his open-mindedness about different views that are based on fact, unlike those who feel that it is primarily important to be surrounded with people who agree all the time.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)