A series of essays in the history of ideas which reveals Isaiah Berlin’s leading philosophical precepts. These include pluralism’s triumph over classical ‘monism’; historicism is the inevitable product of choice, which forms a malleable human nature; and the best humanity can hope for is a society which heads off moral ‘intolerables’. To further cluster some of Berlin’s writing:
• The Western intellectual tradition presumes a single answer which can be rationally discovered and what constitutes a coherent whole. Also, in the West, knowledge includes values. Machiavelli first pointed up the possibility that values and ideals may not be aligned. More concretely, Germans disgruntled with French Enlightenment culture promoted self-conscious localism, through prototypical Romanticism. Berlin concurs: men are not created but born into ‘streams of tradition’; ironically, these streams enable new creations, new traditions but nevertheless do not sustain singular ideals. The Romantics shattered European unity of thought: the 19th and 20th centuries evinced conflict of universal ideals versus Romantic will to power, particularly in nationalist corruption (i.e., the leader embodying ‘folkways’ and the highest-value will).
• Vico fathered cultural pluralism, the view that ideals can be incommensurable. He disputed the ideal of progress or even comparability. But he was not a relativist: what (choices) men have made, others can understand. Berlin assets two types of relativism. The first attacks all objectivity. The second lets empirical matters (i.e., science) off the hook. This is the notorious fact-value distinction. At any rate, 18th-century thinkers were not relativists. The construct began only with Hegel.
• English traditionalists (e.g., Burke) and German Romantics saw mankind benignly. Joseph de Maistre saw sin and malic, attacking Enlightenment rationality and returning to the ‘early’ logic of Saint Thomas. However, he effectively anticipated another outcome of Romanticism – the coalescence of the will around the (20th-century) nation-state and especially the dictator. De Maistre said evolutionary social science is trumped by the group which most fervently believes it’s right.
• The core value of the Romantic is making his own choices. When obsolete, community tradition should be disposed. Men ought not be sacrificed to abstract or objective ideals. The Existentialists succeed the Romantics. The glory of man is to choose: the act of choosing is in fact human nature. To repeat, this is not relativism but acknowledgement of incommensurability and skepticism of human progress. The Romantics shattered the unity of European telos, and also paved the way to rationalism and the Existentialists. Berlin says existentialism (and implicitly their successors, the Postmoderns) are in fact a return to natural law or at least ‘Kantian absolutism’ (wherein the moral worth of an act depends on its being freely chosen), on the grounds that to choose is the irreducible essence of human nature, albeit without the metaphysics of theology. Science cannot control the Romantic will. Therefore the best we can do is to steer clear of intolerable outcomes.
Berlin is more of an apologist than a relativist. His work led him to a dead end in the Western tradition. But he did not lose faith, unlike those who glory in the willful ‘subversion’ of postmodernism.