Why does Russell call the three passions ‘simple’?
<answer> This essay is a preface to the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. A passion/force drives every human throughout their life which keeps them going. A few of them may wish for money while others may desire fame. There are some people who wish for simple satisfaction as well. The desires which Bertie chased in his life were simple. He was driven by his passions which anyone might feel. At first, he wished for love and got it; he felt that it brought ecstasy. He got married four times. The next time, he
wished for knowledge as we all seek for it. He was a political activist, logician, mathematician, wrote on philosophy and contributed to literature for which he was awarded a nobel prize. For the third time, he felt “an unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”. He stood against the Vietnam war and World War I. Anyone will feel pity for a man/woman suffering as they have a heart, and so did Russell. He did not lust for materialistic things; he was born in an aristocratic family of Britain which gave much of what he inherited. In favour of the world government and suffragists, he raised his voice. He trusted in free thought in morals and religion. <context> Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy— ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love, I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought and, though it might seem too good for human life, this is what at least I have found. With equal passion, I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway over the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered to me.