Dear Alan,

Suffice to say your reading of Russell here is very different from that
given by Monk, a prominent and enthusiastic promoter of Wittgenstein, and
denigrator of Russell.  

Note that Monk had read the prior drafts of the piece, and that the Keynes’
1938 attack on Russell he quotes is quite possibly a response to this 1934
piece by Russell.

Monk will have noticed that Russell’s “a kind of philosophy that exalts
intuition” came at a time when “thinking with the blood” was a prominent
idea, but he might not have noticed that the phrase also rather accurately
describes key themes in Keynes’ Treatise.  This would not, however, have
escaped the notice of Keynes or Russell.

I judge the Monk passage is interesting enough to quote in full.  Of course
I do not endorse Monk’s use of the word “bizarrely” 

Rob Tye

Monk Writes (“Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness”!):

'The Cult of Feeling' (or 'The Revolt against Reason', as Russell soon began
calling it), was never written, perhaps because Freedom and Organisation 
was neither a critical nor a commercial success, or perhaps because
Russell's thoughts on the subject could never quite cohere sufficiently for
him to make them the theme of a large book. His preliminary notes for the
book show him experimenting with different explanations as to the cause of
unreason: 

“Unreason is a means of inducing people to act against their own interests,
but in the interests of others. Heroism, self-sacrifice, etc. Supporters of
unreason are those whose interests, on calm reflection, are seen to be
opposed to the general interest; ages of unreason are those in which such
men control propaganda. Fear of socialism is the chief cause of unreason in
the present age.
     Reason depends on the state of the art of war; it flourishes when the
defence is stronger than the attack. Or Reason flourishes when the means by
which I grow rich enriches others; unreason, when I can only grow rich by
impoverishing others.” 

In a Fabian lecture he delivered in October 1934 called 'The Revolt against
Reason' (later reprinted in 'In Praise of Idleness' as 'The Ancestry of
Fascism'), Russell did not commit himself to any of these formulae. Instead,
perhaps rather bizarrely, he traced the 'revolt against reason' to the
scepticism of the eighteenth-century British empiricist, David Hume. In
demonstrating that 'induction is a habit without logical foundation',
Russell claims, Hume had shown that 'science, along with theology, should be
relegated to the limbo of delusive hopes and irrational convictions' and had
thereby undermined the faith in scientific reasoning that had provided the
intellectual foundation of the 'Age of Reason'. Thus: 'among all the
successors of Hume, sanity has meant superficiality, and profundity has
meant some degree of 'madness'. Briskly dismissing Kant's attempts to answer
Hume's scepticism as an obvious sophistry, Russell then charts the rise of a
kind of philosophy that exalts intuition and the pursuit of power and
disdains the concern for rationality and truth that had characterised the
philosophers of the Enlightenment. Fichte, Carlyle, Mazzini and Nietzsche
are named as the 'ancestors' of Fascism, the intellectual root of which is
finally identified as the denial of' objective standards of truth and the
adoption of the view that 'there is English truth, French truth, German
truth, Montenegran truth, and truth for the principality of Monaco'. In his
conclusion, Russell seems to imply that it is the adoption of this view of
truth that prevents international disputes from being decided by negotiation
rather than by war: 

“Between these different 'truths', if rational persuasion is despaired of,
the only possible decision is by means of' war and rivalry in propagandist
insanity... while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation
possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife
inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of' an
appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme
importance to the well-being of the human species, not only in ages in which
it easily prevails but also, and even more, in those less fortunate times in
which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the
virility to kill where they cannot agree.”

 It is in passages like this that one sees the justice of John Maynard
Keynes's famously wicked barb: 'Bertie held two ludicrously incompatible
belief's: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world
stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other
that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally.'