A HAPPY THINKER IN A DARK CENTURY
Michael Ignatieff. ISAIAH BERLIN: A LIFE. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1998.
Isaiah Berlin's life and career blended into an attractive total experience worth our contemplation at century's end. Berlin (1909-1997) selected Michael Ignatieff to write his biography and cooperated with him in the project for nearly a decade.
Berlin insisted, however, that it appear only after his death. The result before us, though tinged with the hagiographic, benefits from an inside perspective and a conscientious attempt to account for weaknesses as well as strengths.
Ignatieff's Berlin is interesting because of the inextricability of the life and the career. Berlin left a lasting body of writing on social and political theory. But he left no major systematic work. His lectures and essays taken together seemed to lack general design. Yet he won acclaim for the originality of his thought. Leaders in government, the arts, and the academy sought him out for his insight. This unorthodox character of his work fits well with the unusual trajectory of his life.
Berlin was a Russian Jew whose affluent mercantile father and mother brought him to England in 1921 when he was eleven years old. He became quickly and deeply Anglified and remained a lifelong admirer of the English well-born, despite his alien origin. Yet he never forgot that he was Russian and Jewish.
The doting love of mother and father for an abnormally bright only child gave Berlin an early confidence that he retained throughout his life. He came to live comfortably with the sense of alienation endemic to European Jews; but it remained a subtle part of his make-up while he moved easily amid the Establishment--even becoming a knight. His acquired Englishness made Berlin unable to consider permanent emigration to the new State of Israel; his Zionist sentiments, nevertheless, remained firm.
His Russian roots led him to the study of Russian thinkers and writers. His two meetings with the dissident poet Anna Akhmatova in post-war Leningrad made perhaps the most moving experience of his life. It immersed him in his original language at its most expressive. It aroused his admiration for Akhmatova's acceptance of hardship as the price of her independent stance toward the regime.
The academic life led by this unusual immigrant to England centered in Oxford. There he won election at age 23 as a fellow to the prestigious All Souls College--the first Jew ever. Ignatieff calls Berlin's six years at All Souls "an experience of complete belonging." All Souls also gave him the firm foundation on which to build his position in the British intellectual establishment.
Berlin's family left Russia on the run from the Bolsheviks. This influenced his theories on liberalism. While colleagues connected liberalism with the left, and the left with the Soviet experiment, he developed a different view. The Soviets suffered from the zeal for total solutions. Berlin's idea of liberty rejected total solutions; it accentuated the individual right to be different. He undertook a book-length study of Marx not because he sympathized with his theories but the opposite: he sought to see the weaknesses of Marx's overarching categories of change.
Berlin moved away from philosophy early in his career toward the history of ideas. This led to his thinking about the legacy of the Enlightenment, its Romantic aftermath, and their combined effects--some horrific--on his times.
His study of the Enlightenment led him to a grand irony. Enlightenment reason was the foundation of liberalism of the sort he espoused. Yet Enlightenment savants mistakenly wanted to identify universal human values and propagate them among humankind, irrespective of particular differences among people.
He did not find a solution to this Enlightenment error in the subsequent Romantic rejection of universal rules of reason. On the contrary, he saw the horrors of the twentieth century foreshadowed in the Romantic celebration of irrational excess. To Berlin's mind, this celebration madly combined with the Enlightenment urge to remake everyone into "reasonable" beings whether or not they wanted transformation.
Berlin's "solution" to the dilemma of modern Europe was to affirm that human values need not be universal or compatible. They could (will) conflict and never be resolved. It was necessary to have a climate of liberty in which incommensurable differences could flourish side by side without violence. Pluralism was the essential condition. Empathy with the person you were not was the core attitude. Out of this situation came the necessity of politics and the inescapability of moral conflict and tragic choice (p.285). Berlin resisted personally as well as intellectually the total resolution of everything or everyone. Contraries and opposites demanded to co-exist.
Ignatieff reports that the aging Berlin gave scant attention to the structuralist and poststructuralist writings coming out of the Continent in the 'sixties and later. I have a hunch that certain threads in that upheaval would have woven compatibly into his thinking, had he put his mind to them.
For example, he could easily have sympathized with the postmodern opposition to metanarratives that tyrannize because they seek to totalize. He probably would have approved of the sometimes-arcane explorations for a postmodern politics that will work without negating difference. And he probably would have confessed that, like the postmodernists to date, he had no adequate political theory to offer that would work effectively against potential tyranny.
If he were living today, I wonder what Berlin would recommend to resolve the misery in the Balkans. He probably would not presume to have more than a hesitant suggestion.
In the end, the Berlin Ignatieff presents was a happy thinker, who proceeded with a "lightness of being." He was lucky in most things of his life. "In a dark century," Ignatieff concludes, "he showed what a life of the mind should be: sceptical, ironical, dispassionate and free." (301)
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The New York Review of Books (14 May 1998) ran a unique article by Berlin that traced the long course of his intellectual path. The article nicely parallels Ignatieff's story of Berlin's life. He was 87 years of age when he wrote it. It was his last essay. I have done a summary of this lucid review of the main ideas of his life: "Hence the Possibility of Human Understanding."
