The fox knows many things but cannot produce a unified theory of being; the hedgehog searches for a core certainty that explains all. Isaiah Berlin’s essay studies the extraordinary instance of Leo Tolstoy, who brilliantly portrayed quotidian life but sought for a holistic view. In this history of ideas, the author contends the Russian drew heavily on the French conservative Joseph de Maistre.
Isaiah Berlin
8. Gray, Isaiah Berlin (17 Apr 2018)
Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism, premised on liberty to choose from among incommensurable goods, yields to pluralism as the irreducible condition of humanity. Straddling Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic will, albeit favoring natural law and so closer to the latter, Berlin’s work shows choice is the essence of human nature, and that philosophy can help think about dilemmas presented by competing ideas; but it cannot solve them. Man’s nature is a result of choices, and so is malleable. On the Enlightenment side, Berlin sees Kantian freedom consisting of obedience to rational will. But it is a negative liberty: if positive freedom were true, conflict could be a symptom of disorder. Instead self-creation (not autonomy) gives value to freedom. Thus he rejects a universal worldview or perfect life: goods cannot be hierarchically assembled or ranked. Contra Plato and Aristotle, Berlin contends human truths are competitive, not unifying. Turning toward the Romantic, which is also the author’s preference, laws of historical development are indefensible while Berlin asserts choices are ‘inherently intelligible’ to others and so deserving of respect. Gray revisits Berlin’s contention that the German Romantics, especially Herder, shattered prototypical Enlightenment rationalism. The author then extends Berlin’s work, contending his ‘agonistic liberalism’ is what remains of rational, moral characteristic of humanity once pluralism is established. But the ground does not hold, in Gray’s view: a choice derives from recognition there is no universal authority. (Grey asserts the Romantics ironically defend Liberal liberty more completely than the Philosophes.) The impression is Gray has enlisted Berlin for postmodernism, as a bridge from respectability to radical claims. As to Berlin himself, it seems he is willing to prove the philosopher’s claim that we don’t know much – and then stops trying. Berlin searches for answers instead of revising the question in the modern context. Perhaps he abandoned philosophy because pluralism is inconsistent with the search for knowledge? Separately, it is annoying that Berlin is perpetually running down Burke as a forerunner to radical nationalists, defined as group choice premised on folkways. (In correspondence with Conor Cruise O’Brien, published in the latter’s Great Melody, Berlin says he doesn’t understand Burke very well!) A strangely enjoyable book, for all its political baggage, because it clarifies the left’s worldview.
9. Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity (11 Jun 2018)
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.