PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL’S NOBEL LECTURE

Abstract

The article presents a critical discourse analysis of the Nobel lecture of the leading British philosopher, logician, writer, politician, 1950 Nobel Prize winner in literature Bertrand Russell. The proposed critical analysis of B. Russell’s discourse was performed using a new interdisciplinary method, which involves identifying the ideological coloring of the discourse fragment, involving a retrospective review of the human values of the mid-twentieth century’s post-war world. The main identified communicative strategy of B. Russell's discourse is the strategy of rationalism, with the help of which he shares his own materialist worldview, combining the author's rhetoric with bare logical arguments. It has been noted that in order to activate the mental activity of the listeners and adhere to the strategy of argumentation, the lecturer appeals to his own episodic autobiographical memory and common semantic socio-cultural memory. The proposed analysis made it possible to extraxt 16 semantic macropropositions underlying the main topics of the speech. The key concepts of the analyzed lecture are identified, which include desire, power and excitement, predefining the conceptual core of the lecture. The second stage of critical discourse analysis reveals local discursive changes in the lexical semantics of the above mentioned concepts of desire, power and excitement. The shifts in meaning are given in comparison with dictionary definitions. Quantitative analysis showed that the most frequently used collocation of the Nobel lecture is love of power, used by the author 16 times in the text. The indicated shifts in the meaning of the concepts point out the excessive idealization of their generalized meanings, exposed by the author in the context of his speech, assigning them with new referencial meanings. The suggested critical discourse analysis has demonstrated that the basic Bertrand Russell’s ideologies activated in his speech were the ideology of materialist rationalism, democracy and pacifism. The analysis made it possible to identify specific author’s conceptual metaphors emerging as a result of conceptual blending. The application of these metaphors allowed the author to directly point out the deep flaws and hidden low desires of the humanity, avoiding condemnations and personal accusations.