何らかの偉大な科学的な発見や発明をしようと実験に従事している人は、家族に貧乏を耐えさせたとしても、その努力が最後の成功で報いられる(名誉を与えられる)ならば、後に非難されることはない。しかしながら、もしも彼が試みている発明や発見に成功しないと、世間は彼のことを’変わり者’だと言って(自分の家族を犠牲にしていることを)強く非難する。(しかし)それは、不公平であると思われる。なぜなら、そういう企てをする場合、だれも、前もって成功を確信することはできないからである(注:即ち、成功して誉められた人も、成功しない可能性だってあったはずであるため)。
出典:The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, chap. 11: Zest
(イラスト:Bertrand Russell’s The Good Citizen’s Alphabet, 1953)
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/HA22-060.HTM
The man who is engaged in experiments with a view to some great scientific discovery or invention is not blamed afterwards for the poverty that he has made his family endure, provided that his efforts are crowned with ultimate success. If, however, he never succeeds in making the discovery or the invention that he was attempting, public opinion condemns him as a crank, which seems unfair, since no one in such an enterprise can be sure of success in advance.
感傷的な人たちが,大地との接触とか,トマス・ハーディの小説に登場する沈着冷静な農夫たちの円熟した知恵とかをあれこれ言うのは大いに結構であるが,地方にいるすべての青年の願いはひとつ,町で仕事を見つけることであり,そこでは,風や天候への隷属や暗い冬の晩の孤独から逃れて,工場や映画館とかといった頼りがいのある人間的な雰囲気にひたることができるのである。仲間とのつきあいや他人との協力は,普通の人間の幸福における不可欠の要素である。そして,この2つは,農業よりも工業において,より充実した形で得られるのである。
出典:The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, chap. 10: Is Happiness Still
Possible?
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/HA21-050.HTM
It is all very well for sentimentalists to speak of contact with the soil and the ripe wisdom of Hardy’s philosophic peasants, but the one desire of every young man in the countryside is to find work in towns where he can escape from the slavery of wind and weather and the solitude of dark winter evenings into the reliable and human atmosphere of the factory and the cinema. Companionship and cooperation are essential elements in the happiness of the average man, and these are to be obtained in industry far more fully than in agriculture.
In taking to agriculture mankind decided that they would submit to monotony and tedium in order to diminish the risk of starvation. When men obtained their food by hunting, work was a joy, as one can see from the fact that the rich still pursue these ancestral occupations for amusement. But with the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
出典:The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, chapt.10: Is Happiness Still Possible?
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/HA21-050.HTM
but the more uninteresting the work becomes, the more possible it is to get it performed by a machine. The ultimate goal of machine production – from which, it is true, we are as yet far removed – is a system in which everything uninteresting is done by machines, and human beings are reserved for the work involving variety and initiative.
出典:The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, chap. 10: Is Happiness still possible?
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/HA21-050.HTM
[寸言] そういった意味では,ロボット研究やその実用化に期待しています。しかし,特に 米国ではロボットの軍事利用がさかんになっており,「悪いことはしなくても利益をあげることができることを示す」ことを社是にしていた Google までが軍事用ロボットを研究していた企業などを買収しました。(安倍政権下の)日本でも少しずつ,ロボットの軍事利用が進んでいくと思われ,歯止めが必要です。(イラスト:海外でも安倍総理は軍国主義的な人間として描かれている。)
米国では戦争を請け負う企業まで出てきており,アメリカ国民の犠牲をすくなくして 敵を大量に殺せるということでロボットの軍事利用をめざしています。ロボットによる代理戦争を描いたSFがまったくの空想でなくなっていくと予想されます。
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. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
出典:”The Study of Mathematics” In: Mysticism and Logic And Other Essays, 1918.
[寸言]
ラッセルのこの言葉は数学を賛美するものもとして,多くの数学好きに好まれ引用されます。
しかし,ゲーデルの不完全性定理や、記号論理学の知識論に果たす貢献の限界を感じるにつれ、数学に対する手放しの賛美の気持ちは少なくなっていきます。八十代後半になると,ラッセルは若い時の上記の数学i対する賛辞を「おおむね無意味だ」と考えるようになっていきました。ラッセルは 1959年(ラッセル87歳の時)に出した、 My Philosophical Developmentの中で次のように書いています。
「(数学は)その主題において非人間的だとは思われなくなった。きわめて不本意ながら,数学は類語反復(トートロジー)からなると信じるようになった。十分な知的能力を持つ精神にとって,数学の全体は,「四つ足の獣は動物である」という命題と同程度につまらぬ主張と見えるであろうと思われる。・・・。私はもはや数学的真理の中にいかなる神秘主義的満足をも見出すことはできない。」
(Mathematics has ceased to seem to me non-human in its subject-matter. I have come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it consists of tautologies. I fear that, to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a forth-footed animal is an animal. In* My Philosophical Development, 1959, pp.211-212.)
He was an Austrian, and his father was enormously rich. Wittgenstein had intended to become an engineer, and for that purpose had gone to Manchester. Through reading mathematics he became interested in the principles of mathematics, and asked at Manchester who there was who worked at this subject. Somebody mentioned my name, and he took up his residence at Trinity. He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G. E. Moore. I remember taking him once to a meeting of the Aristotelian Society, at which there were various fools whom I treated politely. When we came away he raged and stormed against my moral degradation in not telling these men what fools they were. His life was turbulent and troubled, and his personal force was extraordinary. He lived on milk and vegetables, and I used to feel as Mrs Patrick Campbell did about Shaw: ‘God help us if he should ever eat a beefsteak.’ He used to come to see me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down my room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: ‘Are you thinking about logic or about your sins? ‘Both’, he replied, and continued his pacing. I did not like to suggest that it was time for bed, as it seemed probable both to him and me that on leaving me he would commit suicide. At the end of his first term at Trinity, he came to me and said: ‘Do you think I am an absolute idiot?’ I said : ‘Why do you want to know?’ He replied : ‘Because if I am I shall become an aeronaut, but if I am not I shall become a philosopher.’ I said to him: ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know whether you are an absolute idiot or not, but if you will write me an essay during the vacation upon any philosophical topic that interests you. I will read it and tell you.’ He did so, and brought it to me at the beginning of the next term. As soon as I read the first sentence, I became persuaded that he was a man of genius, and assured him that he should on no account become an aeronaut.
出典: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.2 1968, chap. 2: Russia]
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB22-070.HTM
[寸言]
ラッセルは,他人におべっかを使わない、独創的な哲学者であるウィトゲンシュタイン(Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein,1889-1951)が好きであり、当初、高く評価していた。
ウィトゲンシュタインは、周知のように彼の前期と後期とでは、哲学のスタイル及び内容が大変異なっている。ラッセルが評価したのは前期のウィトゲンシュタインであり、後期のウィトゲンシュタインは「哲学すること」を放棄してしまっていると思うようになり、しだいに疎遠になっていった。
しかし、哲学的立場が異なるとしても、ラッセルはウィトゲンシュタインを暖かく見守り続けた。これに対し、ウィトゲンシュタインは、ケンブリッジ大学教授となった後は、ラッセルを初め、自分と考え方の違う研究者を周囲から排斥しがちであった。
ラッセルは、1944年に、6年におよぶ米国滞在を経て、英国に帰国したが、ケンブリッジ大学から招聘があり、ケンブリッジ大学に一時的に復帰するが、その反対運動の先頭にたったのは、ウィトゲンシュタインであった。彼は、1951年に62歳で癌のためになくなっている。
The strain of unhappiness combined with very severe intellectual work, in the years from 1902 till 1910, was very great. (See my letters to Lucy on pp.167ff.) At the time I often wondered whether I should ever come out at the other end of the tunnel in which I seemed to be. I used to stand on the footbridge at Kennington, near Oxford, watching the trains go by, and determining that tomorrow I would place myself under one of them. But when the morrow came I always found myself hoping that perhaps Principia Mathematica would be finished some day. Moreover the difficulties appeared to me in the nature of a challenge, which it would be pusillanimous not to meet and overcome. So I persisted, and in the end the work was finished, but my intellect never quite recovered from the strain. I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before. This is part, though by no means the whole, of the reason for the change in the nature of my work.
出典: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.1, chap. 6: Principia Mathematica, 1967]
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB16-150.HTM
In 1905 things began to improve. Alys and I decided to live near Oxford, and built ourselves a house in Bagley Wood. (At that time there was no other house there.) We went to live there in the spring of 1905, and very shortly after we had moved in I discovered my Theory of Descriptions, which was the first step towards overcoming the difficulties which had baffled me for so long. Immediately after this came the death of Theodore Davies, of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter. In 1906 I discovered the Theory of Types. After this it only remained to write the book out. Whitehead’s teaching work left him not enough leisure for this mechanical job. I worked at it from ten to twelve hours a day for about eight months in the year, from 1907 to 1910. The manuscript became more and more vast, and every time that I went out for a walk I used to be afraid that the house would catch fire and the manuscript get burnt up. It was not, of course, the sort of manuscript that could be typed, or even copied. When we finally took it to the University Press, it was so large that we had to hire an old four-wheeler for the purpose. Even then our difficulties were not at an end. The University Press estimated that there would be a loss of £600 on the book, and while the syndics were willing to bear a loss of £300, they did not feel that they could go above this figure. The Royal Society very generously contributed £200, and the remaining £100 we had to find ourselves. We thus earned minus £50 each by ten years’ work. This beats the record of Paradise Lost.
出典: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.1, chap. 6: Principia Mathematica, 1967]
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB16-140.HTM
I was trying hard to solve the contradictions mentioned above. Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet. Often when evening came it was still empty. We spent our winters in London, and during the winters I did not attempt to work, but the two summers of 1903 and 1904 remain in my mind as a period of complete intellectual deadlock. It was clear to me that I could not get on without solving the contradictions, and I was determined that no difficulty should turn me aside from the completion of Principia Mathematica, but it seemed quite likely that the whole of the rest of my life might be consumed in looking at that blank sheet of paper.What made it the more annoying was that the contradictions were trivial, and that my time was spent in considering matters that seemed unworthy of serious attention.
出典: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.1, chap. 6: Principia Mathematica, 1967]
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB16-130.HTM
[寸言] 若い頃には、誰もが、こんな非生産的なことばかりしていたくないと気が焦ることがあるであろう。若い時、安穏に暮らし、そのようなことを思ったことがない人間は、年をとってから、若い時にもっと勉強しておくべきだった(もっと努力すべきだった)と思うことになる。 (「え? そんなこと思ったことない? 若い時に、裕福かつ環境にめぐまれていた人は、今は、あっちに行っていてください」 by SHOJI Sadao)
その間,アリス(注:ラッセルの初婚相手/右写真)は私以上に不幸であり,また,彼女が不幸であることが私自身の不幸の原因の大きな部分をしめていた。私たち夫婦は,過去きわめて多くの時を,彼女の家族と一緒に過ごした。しかし,私は彼女に,もうこれ以上彼女の母にがまんができないのでファーンハーストを去らなければならないと告げた。私たちは,その年(1902年)の夏を,ウスターシャー州にあるブロードウェイの近くで過ごした。私は,心痛のため感傷的になり,「我々の心は,死せる希望の廃墟のために立派な霊廟を建てる(Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of dead hopes)」といったような文句をよく作った。メーテルリンクの作品を読むこと「さえ」した(注:ラッセルは元来「神秘主義」を好まないためこのような表現になっていると思われる)。この頃以前に,グランチェスターにおいて,私は,悲惨の頂点と危機のうちに,『数学の原理)』(The Principles of Mathematics, 1903)を書き上げた。原稿を書き終えたのは,(1902年)5月23日(注:ラッセルがちょうど30歳の時)のことであった。ブロードウェイで私は,後に『プリンキピア・マテマティカ』になる,数学の精密化に専念した。それまでは,この仕事でホワィトヘッドの協力を得ていたが,自分自身なるがままにしていた非現実的で,不誠実で,感傷的な気分が,私のこの数学の仕事に対してさえも影響を与えていた。私は,草稿の初めの部分をホワイトヘッドに送ったこと,また「すべてが,この本の目的さえも,証明を簡単できちんとしたものに見えるようにするために,犠牲にされている。」という返事を受け取ったことを記憶している。私の仕事上のこの欠点は,当時の私の精神状態における道徳的欠陥によるものであった。
Meanwhile Alys was more unhappy than I was, and her unhappiness was a great part of the cause of my own. We had in the past spent a great deal of time with her family, but I told her I could no longer endure her mother, and that we must therefore leave Fernhurst. We spent the summer near Broadway in Worcestershire. Pain made me sentimental, and I used to construct phrases such as ‘Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of dead hopes’. I even descended to reading Maeterlinck. Before this time, at Grantchester, at the very height and crisis of misery, I finished The Principles of Mathematics. The day on which I finished the manuscript was May 23rd. At Broadway I devoted myself to the mathematical elaboration which was to become Principia Mathematica. By this time I had secured Whitehead’s cooperation in this task, but the unreal, insincere, and sentimental frame of mind into which I had allowed myself to fall affected even my mathematical work. I remember sending Whitehead a draft of the beginning, and his reply: ‘Everything, even the object of the book, has been sacrificed to making proofs look short and neat.’ This defect in my work was due to a moral defect in my state of mind.
出典: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.1, chap. 6: Principia Mathematica, 1967]
詳細情報:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB16-110.HTM