Russell’s Bismarck: Acquaintance Theory and Historical Distance

doi:10.4236/ahs.2013.21003

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Advances in Historical Studies

2013. Vol.2, No.1, 6-10

Published Online March 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ahs) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ahs.2013.21003

Russell’s Bismarck: Acquaintance Theory

and Historical Distance

Thomas Aiello

Department of History, Valdosta State Universit y , Valdost a , USA

Email: [email protected]

Received December 21st, 2012; revised January 23rd, 2013; accepted Feb rua ry 3rd, 2013

The role of acquaintance in Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions is antithetical and, indeed, antago-

nistic toward the practice and assumptions of history. In his 1910 paper “Knowledge by Acquaintance and

Knowledge by Description,” Russell attempts to reconcile direct acquaintance (or its inability to deter-

mine the personal self of others) with a descriptive knowledge that is both logical and personal. Russell

tries to reconcile the internal and external worlds, attempting to explain access to impersonal knowledge

inside a framework that doesn’t allow acquaintance with physical objects—he distorts the historical space

between researcher and subject. In so doing, he argues for the superiority of acquaintance as an arbiter of

knowledge, narrowly avoiding solipsism and wrongly devaluing the most basic of historiograhpical as-

sumptions. His conception creates false historical goals and distorts the space of historical distance, illus-

trated in this paper through the American slavery studies of Herbert Aptheker, Stanley Elkins, and Ken-

neth Stampp.

Keywords: Bismarck; Russell; Acquaintance; Description; Aptheker; Elkins; Stampp

Introduction

None can know Bismarck like Bismarck can know Bismarck.

In his 1910 paper “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowl-

edge by Description,” Russell attempts to reconcile direct ac-

quaintance (or its inability to determine the personal self of

others) with a descriptive knowledge that is both logical and

personal. Russell tries to reconcile the internal and external

worlds, attempting to explain access to impersonal knowledge

inside a framework that doesn’t allow acquaintance with phy-

sical objects—he distorts the historical space between research-

er and subject. In so doing, he argues for the superiority of ac-

quaintance as an arbiter of knowledge, narrowly avoiding sol-

ipsism and wrongly devaluing the most basic of historiogra-

phical assumptions. The role of acquaintance in Bertrand Rus-

sell’s theory of descriptions is antithetical and, indeed, antago-

nistic toward the practice and assumptions of history, leaving

the descriptive knowledge of historians ancillary, sitting quietly

in some kind of cosmic second place. His conception creates

false historical goals and distorts the space of historical distance,

illustrated in this paper through the American slavery studies of

Herbert Aptheker, Stanley Elkins, and Kenneth Stampp.

Russell was a public intellectual and political activist for

much of his long life, but when he presented his 1910 paper

before London’s Aristotelian Society, his principal project re-

mained the application of logical analysis to philosophy. Rus-

sell’s Principia mathematica was at Cambridge University

Press, awaiting publication1. His speeches and published papers

defended an atomistic worldview against the assaults of British

Idealism. The reference to Bismarck in “Knowledge by Acquain-

tance and Knowledge by Description” extends only through a

few brief pages, but the illustration grounds the article and en-

capsulates its argument2.

Descriptions and Acquaintance

Russell’s reference to Bismarck illustrates his contention that

proper names are descriptions. “The thought in the mind of a

person using a proper name correctly can generally only be

expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a descrip-

tion.” (Russell, 1911). He assumes for the sake of the illustra-

tion that direct acquaintance with the personal self is possible,

but an outside observer attempting to know that self can only

access it through description. “If a person who knew Bismarck

made a judgment about him,” writes Russell, “what this person

was acquainted with were certain sense-data which he con-

nected… with Bismarck’s body.” (Russell, 1911). References

to Bismarck rest on descriptions, and those descriptions rest on

a direct acquaintance to some aspect of historical knowledge.

Descriptions allow functional evaluations of Bismarck, getting

the evaluator as close to Bismarck’s direct acquaintance with

himself as is possible. But “in this we are necessarily defeated,

since the actual Bismarck is unknown to us.” (Russell, 1911).

While each description is subjective and different, the fact of

Bismarck’s acquaintance with himself grounds each attempt

and allows communication about him. “What enables us to

communicate in spite of the varying descriptions we employ is

2The essay first appeared in print in January 1918 in the book Mysticism

and Logic, an unorthodox collection of popular philosophical and more

technically analytic. “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by

Description” is among the latter. Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell:The Spirit o

Solitude, 1872-1921 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 519-520. Monk’s

account provides a strong biographical account of Russell’s early life. For

more biographical information on Russell, see Ray Monk, Bertrand Russel

The Ghost of Madness, 1921-1970 (New York: The Free Press, 2000); and

Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1976).

1Russell’s long life lasted from 1872-1970. P r i n cipia mathematicaappeared

in three volumes from 1911-1913.

T. AIELLO

that we know there is a true proposition concerning the actual

Bismarck, and that, however we may vary the description (so

long as the description is correct), the proposition described is

still the same.” (Russell, 1911). Acquaintances facilitate de-

scriptions, and descriptions facilitate communication.

Acquaintance, for Russell, is “a direct cognitive relation” of

a subject to an object—“the converse of the relation of object

and subject which constitutes presentation.” (Russell, 1911).

Particular sense-data and universal concepts are objects of ac-

quaintance, physical objects and other people’s minds are

known by description. When a proper name is described, the

description is direct. But even in this description acquaintance

is necessary. Russell’s logical description of a proposition such

as “Bismarck is mortal” is (x)(Bx & (y)(By·y=x) & Mx)3. The

value any one evaluator places on B (here standing in for “Bis-

marck”), however, still rests on his or her acquaintance with

certain facts about B. So, while description serves to supple-

ment acquaintance with, say, Bismarck’s mind, it depends on

personally selected historical knowledge about Bismarck—

individual acquaintance with some set of facts.

This is indirect access to Bismarck’s personal entities. As

described by Cora Diamond, “Bismarck, using words that he

alone can understand, can reach by the straight road of ac-

quaintance what we can get to only by side-roads, by descrip-

tions.” (Diamond, 2000). Russell, however, clearly states that

the destination we reach through “side-roads” is not equivalent

to Bismarck’s direct acquaintance. Though “we often intend to

make our statement, not in the form involving the description,

but about the actual thing described… we are necessarily de-

feated.” (Russell, 1911). If direct acquaintance with Bismarck’s

self—the relation that is the goal of description—belongs only

to Bismarck, and statements about Bismarck reached by de-

scription are different than their goal (and can never get there

anyway), then either the value of description is compromised or

the original direct acquaintance with the self must not be the

goal of that description. For Russell, getting close counts, but

he never explains what that closeness gives in relation to the

original goal. The proposition “which is described and is

known to be true, is what interests us,” he writes, “but we are

not acquainted with the proposition itself, and do not know it,

though we know it is true.” (Russell, 1911).

Russell’s potential descriptors attempt to arrive at the knowl-

edge Bismarck has—a perfect knowledge of the self, or some-

thing approximate to it—because he has an acquaintance with

himself that others do not have. “It is,” Russell argues, “very

much a matter of chance which characteristics of a man’s ap-

pearance will come into a friend’s mind when he thinks of him;

thus the description actually in the friend’s mind is accidental.

The essential point is that he knows that the various descrip-

tions all apply to the same entity, in spite of not being ac-

quainted with the entity in question.” (Russell, 1911). In 1910,

there were plenty of people who could have known the living

Bismarck and based their knowledge of him on direct ac-

quaintances with the leader. Bismarck for everyone else—those

in 1910 without contact and those in 2013 learning through the

words of books and professors—can only be known through

acquaintance with propositions, which appears farther from

Bismarck’s knowledge than the friend making “accidental”

descriptions. But Russell notes, “We may know that the

so-and-so exists when we are not acquainted with any object

which we know to be the so-and-so, and even when we are not

acquainted with any object which in fact is the so-and-so.”

(Russell, 1911). He also describes the distance from Bismarck

himself, the “various stages” of removal: “There is Bismarck to

people who knew him, Bismarck to those who only know of

him through history, the man in the iron mask, the longest-lived

of men.” (Russell, 1911). The farther we are from the self of

Bismarck, the less access we have to the world of Bismarck.

Acquaintance and History

By subordinating distanced knowledge to a direct acquaint-

ance, and by making every description dependent upon some

form of personal acquaintance, Russell devalues historical

knowledge. If we constantly talk past each other due to various

acquaintances with proper names such as “Bismarck,” how are

we to reconcile statements such as this one made by historian

Lothar Gall? “The Reich as created by Bismarck had not only

narrowed the historical possibilities for the German nation; it

had deformed the nation itself and in so doing had as it were

perpetuated itself in its negative consequences.” (Gall, 1986).

And how far is this statement from Bismarck himself? Does

Gall’s career of research on the Chancellor still fall short of the

personal contact of, say, Baron von Stumm-Halberg or Wilhelm

von Kardorff? Could either of them have drawn this conclusion?

It bears repeating that Russell posits knowledge by description,

a series of those removed acquaintances, as the only method by

which one could know Bismarck. But by making that knowl-

edge subservient to a quest for the mind of Bismarck, he sells

short the independent value of that description. “Knowledge

concerning what is known by description is ultimately reducible

to knowledge concerning what is known by acquaintance.”

(Russell, 1911). This is not the verificationism of Rudolph Car-

nap, but it sounds like it. Russell makes all understanding de-

pendent on acquaintance with particular sense-data, but the use

of the original acquaintance in direct descriptions to represent

an entity that can never be known the way the descriptor in-

tends to know it gives Russell’s acquaintance theory less surety

than logical positivism. He tells us that we can know, and how

to know, but he never tells us what we can know—the value of

a knowledge filtered through acquaintances and descriptions in

relation to the self-acquaintance of our actual subject. Portray-

ing that knowledge as “good enough” does not seem to be good

enough.

Referring to Bismarck’s reference to himself, Russell notes,

“Here the proper name has the direct use which it always

wishes to have, as simply sta nding for a certain object, and not

for a description of the object. But if a person who knew Bis-

marck made a judgment about him, the case is different.”

(Russell, 1911). Herein lies another inconsistency. Any propo-

sition posited by a distanced evaluator contains only a proper

name, and the proper name is a representative of a collection of

facts with which the evaluator is directly acquainted. Bismarck

the historical actor is not in the impersonal proposition. “His-

torical actor” itself is simply a possible element to be directly

described by the proper name “Bismarck.” In other words, each

reference to Bismarck in the proposition is an opportunity for

potential acquaintances. How can Bismarck’s acquaintance with

the self be held as the goal of descriptive propositions if such an

entity as a self-acquainting Bismarck no longer exists and can-

not even be found in language? Russell might respond that

3Generally translated: There exists an x. x is Bismarck. [If y is Bismarck,

then y equals x. (All instances of Bismarck are instances of x.)] x is mortal.

T. AIELLO

since the bases of every description are direct acquaintances,

which lend access to knowledge of the world, and since (in this

example) people can have direct acquaintance with the self,

then both Bismarck and his self-acquaintance are justly as-

sumed. After all, the theory of descriptions was intended as a

method of giving individuals access to knowledge of the world

not based on direct experience. But Russell’s response would

be insufficient, as any direct acquaintance that acts as an ele-

ment of the direct description “Bismarck”—such as, to use one

of Russell’s examples, “Bismarck was the first Chancellor of

the German Empire”—finds the proper name embedded in the

proposition. (Russell, 1911). We are left farther and farther

from the knowledge of the intended target with each new pro-

position attempting to posit that knowledge. No history book,

for example, could possibly render a presentation of the first

Chancellor of the German Empire without including a proper

name. “We can only be assured,” he argues, “of the truth of our

judgment in virtue of something with which we are acquaint-

ed—usually a testimony heard or read.” (Russell, 1911). Even

if it is taken for granted that the history book’s Bismarck is

equivalent to the dinner conversation’s Bismarck (which per-

haps is allowing too much, anyway), it remains a proper name,

a stand in for another conglomeration of direct acquaintances,

all of which will hinge on the inclusion of the referent’s proper

name.

Solipsism and Knowledge

For Russell, the theory of descriptions circumvented possible

charges of solipsism in acquaintance theory by granting access

to knowledge of the outside world. As Cora Diamond para-

phrases Russell’s arguments in “Knowledge by Acquaintance

and Knowledge by Description” and other works of the early

1910s, “the limits of the world, about which I can have knowl-

edge, and the objects in which I can denote (whether directly or

in some cases only indirectly ), lie outside the li mits of the realm

of my own experience.” (Diamond, 2000). But Russell ties

everything that can be known to a series of acquaintances,

wholly within “the realm of my own experience.” Prior to his

Bismarck illustration, but in the same paper, Russell notes that

physical objects and other people’s minds are not “among the

objects with which we are acquainted.” (Russell, 1911). If our

knowledge is dependent on acquaintance with sense data (only

cognized at the point in which it comes into contact with our

senses, within the realm of personal experience), and that sense

data is in aid of grasping truths (such as Bismarck’s self aware-

ness) that we can never know, how valid is the knowledge that

lies between these two poles? It seems that Russell is masking

solipsism, rather than arguing against it. If that knowledge is

“indirect,” can it be considered whole? Or, perhaps, can it be

considered equivalent to direct knowledge that we cannot have?

Russell does not answer these questions. Nor does he give a

firm account of how these two forms of knowledge are cogni-

tively related. The primacy of acquaintance makes even direct

descriptions suspect, because in evaluating the logical descrip-

tion of, say, “Bismarck,” any evaluator must have direct ac-

quaintances for evidence of B (and those acquaintances will be

unique to the evaluator, anyway). “We know that there is an

object B called Bismarck,” writes Russell, “and that B was an

astute diplomatist. We can thus describe the proposition we

should like to affirm, namely, ‘B was an astute diplomatist,’

where B is the object which was Bismarck.” (Russell, 1911).

Any evaluator of that description will again come to B through

a unique set of acquaintances.

That uniqueness—that personalness that characterizes indi-

vidual acquaintance—does not, for Russell, preclude agreed

upon knowledge. “Let us assume that we think of [Bismarck] as

‘the first Chancellor of the German Empire.’ Here all the words

are abstract except ‘German.’ The word ‘German’ will again

have different meanings for different people. To some it will

recall travels in Germany, to some the look of Germany on the

map, and so on. But if we are to obtain a description which we

know to be applicable, we shall be compelled, at some point, to

bring in a reference to a particular with which we are acquaint-

ed.” (Russell, 1911). Clearly, however, Germany’s shape—its

border—is a valid particular, and when one participant in

communication understands “German” as, “a human within the

designated border of Germany,” and another assumes, “de-

scendant of the various former Saxon kingdoms,” then that

communication is not direct. We are constantly talking past

each other. But, for Russell, the fact of Bismarck’s own self-

acquaintance, his existence, makes indirect knowledge—these

close approximations to specific agreement—valid. Even if this

state of affairs was acceptable, it does not coincide with Rus-

sell’s theory of descriptions, the goal of which was clarity and

specificity. Furthermore, any statement about Bismarck indi-

rectly references Bismarck’s personal knowledge, what Dia-

mond calls his “private object.” “The quantified proposition,”

as Diamond notes, “follows from Bismarck’s private proposi-

tion.” (Diamond, 2000). This relation between a distanced de-

scription (the “quantified proposition”) and Bismarck’s per-

sonal knowledge demonstrates, for Russell, the benefit in the

attempt. But even the interpretation of the logic of direct de-

scription rests on personal judgments about what sort of

knowledge we have about an object we can never truly know

(to use the aforementioned example, B), so the relation between

the distanced and the personal is constantly changing.

At first glance, this emphasis on the personal can sound like

psychologism, and some psycho-historical compromise be-

tween acquaintance theory and, say, traditional history or soci-

ology, which claim to know individuals better than they know

themselves, would seem appropriate. But Russell was just as

disdainful of psychologism in logical formulation as was his

predecessor Gottlob Frege. Frege not only sought to corral

psychologism, but, like Russell, tried to define away subjectiv-

ity in knowledge. His 1892 “On Sinn and Bedeutung” describes

a “common store of thoughts,” which humans share “from one

generation to another.”4 (Frege, 1892). He would, twenty-six

years later, develop his notion of thought further—its objectiv-

ity and residence in “a third realm”—explaining that it is inde-

pendent of subjectivity, “timelessly true, true independently of

whether anyone takes it to be true.” (Frege, 1918). Thoughts,

for Frege, are the mental entities the whole has acknowledged

as true, independent of what individuals think about them.

What individuals think about them—ideas—act as agents of

access from the mind to the outside thought. Thus, thought is

objective, and ideas only serve as mediating devices to thought,

never from it. Sense, too, is objective, certainly a more difficult

argument to validate considering that it initially seems to stem

4Sinn translates as “sense.” Bedeutung generally translates as “reference,”

because “r eference ” is t he clos est fun ctional match, bu t bedeutung carries a

linguistic weight unequalled by “reference,” and so here is retained in the

original German. It is also retained in editor Michael Beany’s The Frege

eade

, whose translation was used in this study.

T. AIELLO

from the interpretation of individual minds—the places from

which ideas connect to thought. “The same sense is not always

connected,” Frege notes, “even in the same man, with the same

idea. The idea is subjective.” (Frege, 1892). This, however, only

hints at what Frege expressed more clearly other places. “The

sense of the name,” he noted in a 1914 letter to Philip Jourdain,

“is part of the thought.” (Frege, 1914). If thoughts are found

entities—if they are independent of mental creation, simply

discovered and agreed upon by those who acknowledge axioms

and laws—then the functional display of thought (perhaps not

its third realm existence, but surely its useful existence in mind

and discourse) is predicated on combinations of senses, which

facilitate specificity in meaning. “Without a Bedeutung,” Frege

noted in his 1914 letter, “we could indeed have a thought, but…

not a thought that could further scientific knowledge. Without a

sense, we would have no thought, and hence also nothing that

we could recognize as true.” (Frege, 1914).

Acquaintance Theory and Its Role in Slave

Histories

Sense and Bedeutung helped Frege remove any lurking psy-

chologism, an attempt most historians choose not to make. But

psycho-historical models are fraught with difficulties of their

own. Historian Kenneth Stampp elaborated an effective critique

of historical psychologism and verificationism in the descrip-

tion of American slavery in his 1971 “Rebels and Sambos: The

Search for the Negro’s Personality in Slavery.” (Stampp, 1971).

Like Russell and Frege, he tries to carve a middle ground that

accounts for knowledge, description, and acquaintance. He

criticizes the analysis of historian Herbert Aptheker, who de-

scribed slaves as active participants in the culture of revolution

perpetuated by slave life, as flawed for its childlike faith in the

limited source material available. Aptheker’s American Negro

Slave Revolts claimed to have found almost two hundred fifty

slave revolts and conspiracies for freedom, each including at

least ten slaves. Stampp notes that while white fear and suppo-

sition of revolt mean something about slave culture, they do not

necessarily mean revolt. By only countenancing written records

as absolute proof (and subsequently ignoring bias, literacy rates,

etc.), Aptheker skewed historical reality to create of the Ameri-

can slave a perpetually rebelling agent. (Stampp, 1971; Apthek-

er, 1943) Stampp also critiques historian Stanley Elkins’s use

of role theory psychoanalysis in evaluations of slave life. Elkins

argued that the closed society of North American slavery and

the single significance of the master/slave relationship con-

spired to create a childlike subservience in slaves that kept them

docile and impotent, a personality he labeled “Sambo.” The

mistakes of his argument lie at the polar extreme from those of

Aptheker. Elkins applied psychoanalytic models to an assumed

group, without first evaluating the historical record to see if his

various theoretical models effectively mapped on to the condi-

tion of the American slave. Stampp responds by warning of

both the danger of applying psychoanalytic categories to his-

torical groups and the contingency of comparative history with-

out primary document research. (Stampp, 1971; Elkins, 1959).

Where Aptheker practiced a tunnel-vision empiricism without a

rigorous critical examination, Elkins applied critical theory to a

subject he had yet to empirically evaluate. It should be ac-

knowledged, however, that Stampp was no Russellian, and did

acknowledge the validity of psychology, speech pathology, and

other alternative interpretive methods in historical research5.

(Feinberg & Kasrils, 1983) More importantly, in delineating

this middle ground, Stampp never abandoned the general his-

torical contention that proper analysis of documents and source

material could lead to an understanding of slavery more com-

plete than any slave or slavemaster could have held. Distanced

knowledge was not subordinate. Propositions could render

agreed upon knowledge without direct acquaintance.

For Russell, “Every proposition which we can understand

must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are

acquainted.” (Russell, 1911). Those acquaintances create logi-

cal propositions that stand in logical relation to other logical

propositions. For Diamond, “If I can take a sentence to stand in

logical relations to other sentences, then I can understand that

sentence.” (Diamond, 2000). So interpreters can understand

sentences about Bismarck, but that understanding will still

contain an element of the personal. “Considered psychologi-

cally, apart from the information we convey to others, apart

from the fact about the actual Bismarck, which gives impor-

tance to our judgment,” writes Russell, “the thought we really

have contains the one or more particulars involved, and other-

wise consists wholly of concepts.” (Russell, 1911). Those par-

ticulars, it should be remembered, are not physical objects.

They are sense data, conveyed by logical propositions. In logic,

however, “where we are concerned not merely with what does

exist, but with whatever might or could exist or be, no reference

to actual particulars is involved.” (Russell, 1911). Why is a

method unconcerned with particulars used to convey particulars

in aid of knowledge of the external world? If an evaluator has

logic and Bismarck has self-acquaintance, why is that self-

acquaintance held as the goal of inquiry? How can these be

considered functionally equal? Perhaps the best counter to the

problems of Russell’s Bismarck was offered by Frege in 1918:

Not everything that can be the object of my acquaintance

is an idea. I, as owner of ideas, am not myself an idea.

Nothing now stops me from acknowledging other men to

be the owners of ideas, just as I am myself. And, once

given the possibility, the probability is very great, so great

that it is in my opinion no longer distinguishable from

certainty. Would there be a science of history otherwise?

Would not all moral theory, all law, otherwise collapse?

What would be left of religion? The natural sciences too

could only be assessed as fables like astrology and al-

chemy. Thus the reflections I have set forth on the as-

sumption that there are other men besides myself, who

can make the same thing the object of their consideration,

their thinking, remain in force without any essential

weakening (Frege, 1918).

Russell’s illustration, however, weakens. It leaves many

questions unanswered as it attempts to reconcile the internal

and external worlds—as he tries to have it both ways in at-

tempting to explain access to impersonal knowledge inside a

framework that doesn’t allow acquaintance with physical ob-

jects. But he cannot have it both ways.

5Russell, in turn, was no Stamppian. He did, however, later in his life,

rovide his own evaluation on slavery, though far less nuanced than that o

his historian counterparts. Speaking at the Civil Rights Freedom March, 28

August 1963, in Washington DC, Russell declared, “The treatment of the

American Negr o i s an at ro cit y whi ch h as a hi sto ry of thr ee hun dr ed year s in

what is no w the Untied Stat es of America… He has s uffered an ex perience

of systematic terror in which he could, and indeed can today in many parts

of the Untied States, be shot down at will.” (Feinberg & Kasrils, 1983).

T. AIELLO

REFERENCES

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