In this collection of essays, Berlin ruminates on culture, politics, history, and philosophy with his usual style, which is academic without being overly didactic. He maintains he is a pluralist, not a cultural relativist- a theme he propounds on throughout his writings. “Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false.” Therefore, he offers up that any humane political philosophy should be moderate, have a presumption towards the utilitarian, possess humility, and avoid the extremes of suffering. Berlin ridicules all forms of utopia as static models with no need for novelty and change (by definition) and, therefore, insufficient. He claims that if it is deemed that there is only one correct answer, then all other answers must necessarily be incorrect. “This is not accepted by those who declare that men’s temperaments, gifts, outlooks, wishes permanently differ one from another, that uniformity kills, that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in societies in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions- the freedom for what J.S. Mill called ‘experiments in living’- in which there is liberty of thought and of expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence; that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.” These disagreements arise when talking not just about means, but also about ultimate ends “for variety entails the possibility of the conflict of values, of some irreducible incompatibility between the ideals, or, indeed, the immediate aims, of fully realised, equally virtuous men.”
His essay on Giambattista Vico contrasts what he sees as Vico’s pluralism with relativism, which does not seek to understand and comprehend the other. Pluralism does see multiple cultures, each with their own visions and scales of values, but bounded by the commonality that makes us all human. Vico sought to ‘enter into’ or ‘descend into’ the minds of others to understand them based on their own unique historical milieu. Vico points out that “Homeric men are ‘boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult, and obstinate in their resolves.’ Achilles is cruel, violent, vindictive, concerned only with his own feelings; yet he is depicted as a blameless warrior, the ideal hero of the Homeric world. The values of that world have passed away.” Homeric men were not worse men, just of another time. Ultimately, what Vico rejected was any sort of “possibility of establishing the final truth in all the provinces of human thought by application of the laws of the natural sciences.” For Vico, culture, history, and human development all had to be accounted for to understand, if not accept, a plurality of morals, all equally human. “Each phase is incommensurable with the others, since each lives by its own light and can be understood only in its own terms, even though these terms form a single intelligible process, which is not wholly, or, perhaps, even largely, intelligible to us.” Berlin contrasts this with relativism. “Relativism is something different: I take it to mean a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood…. Relativism, in its modern form, tends to spring from the view that men’s outlooks are unavoidably determined by forces of which they are often unaware- Schopenhauer’s irrational cosmic force; Marx’s class-bound morality; Freud’s unconscious drives; the social anthropologists’ panorama of the irreconcilable variety of customs and beliefs conditioned by circumstances largely uncontrolled by men.” In contrast, Vico argues, “we are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.” Berlin threads the needle between utopia and relativism, but also confirms that “to understand is not to accept…. One can reject a culture because one finds it morally or aesthetically repellent, but, on this view, only if one can understand how and why it could nevertheless, be acceptable to a recognisably human society.”
Berlin’s longest essay is on Joseph de Maistre, who Berlin argues, far from being a conservative, actually presaged and exemplified 20th century fascism. Maistre lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era as a Savoyard aristocrat and diplomat. He famously argued for the trinity of classicism, monarchy, and the Church, which he further boiled down into two- “Throne and Altar”. Emile Faguet characterized him thus, “‘his Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the State’; his faith is ‘a slightly touched-up paganism’. He is a Roman of the fifth century, baptised but Roman; or alternatively a ‘Praetorian of the vatican’.” Needless to say, he was an enemy of the Enlightenment and all abstract thought. He despised a priori reasoning, appealing, instead, to actual lived man and historical fact. “Maistre, at any rate in the works of his maturity, is consumed by the sense of original sin, the wickedness and worthlessness of the self-destructive stupidity of men left to themselves. Again and again he dwells on the fact that suffering alone can keep human beings free from all falling into the bottomless abyss of anarchy and the destruction of all values. On one side ignorance, willfulness, idiocy; on the other, as the remedy, blood, pain, punishment…. Whatever is rational collapses because it is rational, man-made: only the irrational can last. Rational criticism will erode whatever is susceptible to it: only what is insulated against it, by being inherently mysterious and inexplicable, can survive. What man makes, man will mar: only the superhuman endures.” But man is free. Alone amongst all creatures, he struggles for knowledge, expression, and, finally, salvation. “Religion is superior to reason not because it returns more convincing answers than reason, but because it returns no answer at all. It does not persuade or argue, it commands.” As for monarchy, Maistre “prized loyalty above all virtues; the less worthy the embodiment of the legitimate royal power, the greater obedience was due to it, so that the principle of unquestioning obedience owed by the subject to his sovereign might shine forth the more clearly.” Institutions “are strong and durable to the extent that they are conceived of as divine…. Sovereignty must be indivisible, for if it is distributed there is no centre of authority, and all things fall to pieces.” Maistre viewed power above all else. It was his unquestioning loyalty to this power in which Maistre presaged the fascist monstrosities to come.
Berlin concludes this collection of essays by circling back again to the theme of pluralism in political philosophy. He asserts that it is a modern Romantic concept, not shared by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Platonists, or even Stoics. “The notion that the truth is not necessarily one, that values are many, that they may conflict, that there is something sublime in dying for one’s own vision of the truth even though it may be condemned by the rest of the world- that, I think, would before the eighteenth century have seemed to be a very eccentric position.” There are choices between final ends- justice and mercy, order and liberty- and these value judgements are ultimate, not incidental. “Man is independent and is free, that is to say, that the essence of man is not consciousness, nor the invention of tools, but the power of choice…. The glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master (even if at times this fills him with fear and a sense of solitude).” As Kant professed, without freedom there is no morality. The Romantics were devoted to following their own Will, their unique calling, no matter the consequences or their resulting impressions upon society. “The Romantic outlook condemns success as such as both vulgar and immoral; for it is built, as often as not, on a betrayal of one’s ideals, on a contemptible arrangement with the enemy. A correspondingly high value is placed upon defiance for its own sake, idealism, sincerity, purity of motive, resistance in the face of all odds, noble failure, which are contrasted with realism, worldly wisdom, calculation, and their rewards- popularity, success, power, happiness, peace bought at morally too high a price…. For the disciples of the new philosophy suffering was nobler than pleasure, failure was preferable to worldly success, which had about it something squalid and opportunist, and could surely be bought only at the cost of betraying one’s integrity, independence, the inner light, the ideal vision within.” As Fichte stated, “I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will.” Pluralism cannot only descend into relativism, but it can also be perverted into nationalism. It is a slippery slope from pride in diversity to the thought that one particular culture is better- the one best way amongst many. The German Romantics and Idealists such as Lenz, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Holderlin straddled that line. “This is the beginning of nationalism, and even more of populism. Herder upholds the value of variety of spontaneity, of the different, idiosyncratic paths pursued by peoples, each with its own style, ways of feeling and expression, and denounces the measuring of everything by the same timeless standards…. Human customs, activities, forms of life, art, ideas, were (and must be) of value to men not in terms of timeless criteria, applicable to all men and societies, irrespective of time and place, as the French lumieres taught, but because they were their own, expressions of their local, regional, national life, and spoke to them as they could speak to no other human group. This is why men withered in exile.” Herder believed in a rich variety of life and a diversity of national forms, none superior to another. Berlin was a true political moderate, who proudly tried to thread the needle between delicate concepts without compromise or wishy-washiness. His truths were not always simple, but they were profound. Pluralism and negative liberty, in which man was given space to fulfill his own wishes, were his ideals. His idea that final ends sometimes cannot be reconciled, but that each are equally valid was anathema to Christians and Marxists alike. Berlin gave place to science and reason, but also knew that man was a creature of his unique culture and history. Berlin believed that all of this was part and parcel of man and, in the end, had to be reconciled within him and within the society in which he happened to live.
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