InterfaceFLOR, Room 201 Raffles City, 268 Central Xizang Zhong lu, Shanghai
Address in Chinese: 西藏中路268号,来福士广场办公楼201室(二楼),英特飞
Professor Louis Greenspan
On Russell in China
In June 1920, following his return from the fledgling Soviet Union, Bertrand Russell received an offer to spend one year at the National University of Beijing to lecture on philosophy, mathematics and a number of wider subjects. He accepted immediately. For him a year in Asia would provide an opportunity for personal renewal and an opportunity to observe a movement of national renewal that might benefit the whole of humanity.
He arrived in Shanghai on October 12 1920, in the midst of the ferment of the Chinese Cultural springtime that had been sparked by the May 4 demonstrations of 1919. In a few short years the Chinese had overthrown their own imperial Dynasty, were agitating forcefully to end the privileges granted foreign imperialist powers and were debating the Chinese road to a modern state. The National University of Beijing was in the centre of this agitation and had invited several western figures, including John Dewey and (after Russell) Henri Bergson to offer guidance.
As well, Russell was seeking a new beginning for himself.He completed the legal formalities that brought his first marriage to an end and embarked on a new relationship with Dora Russell who accompanied him to China and became his second wife. In addition he sought to reconsider and clarify his philosophical thinking which had come under severe criticism from his former pupil Wittgenstein. His lectures were drawn from his technical philosophy but also from the writings on social reconstruction that he had published during the war.
Russell did not come to China to help make the Chinese “more like us”. On the contrary he believed the West had brought itself to ruin in the Great War was, itself in need of renewal and came to believe that China might lead the way.
His lectures throughout the country were loving accounts of China’s culture and its possibilities. They were heard by many of China’s future leaders but were cut short in the middle of his stay by a devastating attack of pneumonia from which he nearly died (indeed obituaries appeared in the British Press). He continued to write about China for some time after his return to England.
Dr. Louis Greenspan is Professor Emeritus at McMasterUniversity where he was one of the founding members of the highly regarded Department of Religious Studies. He taught in the area of Religion and the Social Sciences.
From 1996 he was the Director of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project, an adjunct of McMaster’s Bertrand Russell archive. There he published a number of articles on Russell’s political thought and assisted in the editorial work of this project
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