Philosophy and Nuclear War

 

While looking for other things entirely, during the last few days I've run across some citations from the years 1947-1952 which put philosophy in a rather odd light. The topic is nuclear warfare, and the authors are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and the process philosopher and theologian Charles Hartshorne.

Wittgenstein's statement is the oddest and the most unpleasant:

The hysterical fear over the atom bomb being experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutary has been invented. The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: If this didn’t have something good about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, - our disgusting soapy water science [ekelhaften seifenwäßrigen wissenschaft]. And certainly that’s not an unpleasant thought, but who can say what would come after this destruction? The people making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed

Culture and Value,
1946, pp. 48-9

One might think, given his later political activities as well as his difficult relationship with Wittgenstein (who despised what he regarded as the glibness of Russell's writings on social questions), that Bertrand Russell would have been among the anti-nuclear "scum of the intellectuals" of whom Wittgenstein spoke. But in fact, during the period 1945-1947 Bertrand Russell actually advocated preventive nuclear war against the USSR.

Ray Perkins, in "Bertrand Russell and Preventive War", analyzes the period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, focusing on a 1948 incident when Russell, in an address to students at the Westminster School, was widely believed to have advocated preventive war against the Soviet Union. Perkins position is that this charge is exaggerated, and that what Russell put forward -- in this and most other writings of the period -- was the conditional proposition that the West should wage war against the Soviet Union unless the Soviets agreed to international control of atomic energy and weapons, and that the USSR would likely comply.

However, a combination of public misunderstanding of the conditional nature of Russell's proposal, and the publication in 1954 of a clearly belligerent private letter of Russell's, sent in 1948 to a Berkeley, California psychiatrist named Walter Marseille, led many critics, including I.F. Stone, to assume that Russell had defended the nuclear strategy all along. This was complicated by erroneous admissions and denials on Russell's part about what he had actually said, which Perkins attributes to "faulty memory and a desire to draw attention away from the bellicose nature of the Marseille letter."

Review of Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language, ed. Schwerin (Greenwood, 2002; excerpt.)


And in about 1952 Charles Hartshorne, a Christian process philosopher of very benign temperament,  added the following note at the end of a book on completely unrelated philosophical topics:

In perhaps apparent contradiction to some of the foregoing, I feel bound to state that it would in my opinion be a form of the pacifist error to reject either strategic bombing or the use of the atomic bomb just because they are horrible. For all war is and so is enduring slavery. Moreover, bombing planes and the atomic bombs are precisely the two means of warfare in which we now have and can long keep a great superiority over Russia.

Reality as Social Process,
Free Press, 1953, p. 213.

None of these philosophers says what might have been be expected of him, as Hartshorne acknowledges. Wittgenstein's alarming statement perhaps displays the depth of disgust he felt for the political world -- though Wittgenstein was capable of intense disgust for reasons much less significant than World War Two (for example, "ekelhaften seifenwäßrigen wissenschaft"). Russell's statements (which the LaRouchies have plastered all over the internet, BTW) are less surprising when one realizes that, despite his later reputation, he had never been a Communist sympathizer, and that his objection to World War One had not been based on pacifism, but on the utter stupidity and uselessness of the war.

All three statements are reminders of the degree of anxiety that the Soviet threat caused even after WWII had been won, and the degree to which WWII had conditioned people, even philosophers, to regard desperate measures as acceptable and mass killing as thinkable.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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