“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

What does it mean?

The mainstream reading is a double condition: love inspires the good life and knowledge guides it, and he says either one without the other fails. His example of love without knowledge is a population told to crowd into churches during a pestilence, which spreads the infection. His example of knowledge without love is the late war. A competing reading hears a soft equation of goodness with being nice and well read. He denies that he can prove the view, and he offers it as a claim about which community satisfies more desires. The sentence is the centre of chapter 2 of the little book What I Believe. Love, he adds, is in a sense more fundamental because it leads intelligent people to seek knowledge for the sake of those they love. Guidance is the part slogans drop.

Did Bertrand Russell really say this?

The library’s label is Well attested. Russell's own English, stated as his view in chapter 2 of What I Believe (1925). He adds that neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love produces a good life. The sentence is not from The Problems of Philosophy.

Where it comes from

What I Believe, chapter 2

Approximate date: 1925.

How to use it

A fundraiser in Glasgow that appeals to pity and will not look at whether the programme works is the church in the pestilence. A fraud team that is brilliant and indifferent is the war. The sentence does not say which policy to pass. It says a life, or an office, that has only one of the two is not the good one on his account. A charity board can use the line as a standing question: who is loved here, and what do we actually know? Without the second, the first is dangerous. He says so in the next sentences.

A mindset reading

Refuse the flattering split that makes warmth enough or cleverness enough. The habit is to check a generous plan for its facts and a clever plan for its loves. Russell is not smuggling in a saint. He thinks the good life is indefinitely improvable because both love and knowledge can grow. That is a demand, not a compliment.

Understand the philosophy

What I Believe is a short statement of his ethics and his rejection of religious authority, published in 1925. The key sentence of chapter 2 sets love and knowledge as joint conditions. Chapter 1 and the later pages connect this to a naturalistic picture of the world. The Conquest of Happiness and the essay on idleness are other books. This sentence is the normative core he was willing to put in one line, with the failures spelled out beside it.

Related

• “Philosophy is to be studied not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.”

  Well attested

• “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

  Well attested

• “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.”

  Well attested

Related fallacy. Ad hominem. An ad hominem answers a claim by attacking the person who made it, instead of the reasons. A fact about the speaker is relevant only when it actually bears on the evidence, such as a shown conflict of interest or a record of false reports on this subject.

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