"HENCE THE POSSIBILITY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Isaiah Berlin. "My Intellectual Path". The New York Review of Books 14 May 1998: 53-60.
_______________________________________________________________
First part: Verificationism and Phenomenalism
According to the NYRB, Isaiah Berlin wrote this essay in 1996 to satisfy
a request from Chinese philosopher Ouyang Kang, who
was compiling an introduction to Anglo-American
philosophy for his students. Berlin came out of a long silence
because he saw the importance of this new Chinese audience.
Verificationism and Phenomenalism
Berlin divided his essay into two parts. First, he described his early years in Oxford philosophy before WWII. These were the feisty years of his All Souls' fellowship. His rooms were the scene of debates among the likes of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Berlin identified two dominant topics of his philosophical thinking of that time, both outgrowths of the empiricism that arose in Britain in the earlier twentieth century.
(1) Verificationism. Berlin was absorbed in the Vienna School issue of verifying a statement but he disavowed true discipleship. "I always believed that statements that could be true or false..., while indeed they did relate to the world as empirically conceived..., were nevertheless not necessarily capable of being verified by some simple knockdown criterion, as the Vienna School and their logical positivist followers asserted." (53)
(2) Phenomenalism. Berlin aligned himself against idealism, the view that our world is entirely created by human faculties. He disavowed belief in "any metaphysical truths." He rejected not only the truths of objective idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel); he also rejected rationalist truths (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, even Kant). He considered any search for absolute philosophical certainty to be illusory.
Berlin acknowledged his admiration for the eighteenth century Enlightenment, the French philosophes in particular. He acclaimed them for being "the first organized adversaries of dogmatism, traditionalism, religion, superstition, ignorance, oppression." (54) But he acknowledged that the certainties of Enlightenment thinking led to the destructive dogmatism of Marx and his followers.
The second part of Berlin's essay was titled "History of Ideas and Political Theory." It held greater interest for me because here he recounted his preoccupation with the central problems of his mature years following WWII. One was monism and its opposite, pluralism. The second was the notion of freedom and its opposite, determinism.
Monism vs. Pluralism
Berlin set himself against the underlying thesis of the natural sciences and the philosophes whom he admired. They subscribed to the thesis that "to all true questions there must be one true answer and one only." He resisted this thesis, which inspired rationalists and Rousseauians alike to seek the answer to making a perfect world. Berlin thought it was nonsense to seek a perfect world. He thus opposed the monism that drove not only the modern world but the whole of the Western intellectual tradition back to Plato.
He at first grounded his opposition to monism on his studies of Giambattista Vico and of Johann Gottfried Herder.
Vico, the first thinker to conceive of the idea of cultures, persuaded Berlin that questions differ from culture to culture, "and there are no universal answers to all their questions." (56)
Herder reinforced him in this persuasion. Herder valued the center of gravity and independence of each national culture; he saw unification of different national cultures as destruction. Berlin adopted Herder's view that, while there was a common human nature to some degree, no universally true answers held from one culture to another. "Mankind was not one but many." (56)
Berlin then traced this idea of cultural difference as it evolved in Romantic thinking and expressed his distress at the extremes to which it went in Europe. The Romantics and their offspring, in Berlin's interpretation, not only denied universally true answers; they emphasized the man-made character of values. This esthetic approach led in his view to the rampant nationalism that racked the twentieth century.
Berlin rejected in toto the Romantic notion of mankind as a subject rather than an object. He denied that it was "an ever-moving spirit, self-creating and self-moving, a self-composed drama in many acts, which...will end in some kind of perfection." (57) He affirmed his empiricist stance, claiming to know only what he could experience.
Interestingly, however, he then explained how the impact of Romanticism on his thinking, combined with his studies of Vico and Herder, influenced his stance as a pluralist.
He concluded that "there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments." (57)t This did not make him a relativist, however. Berlin thought that humans can pursue a different but finite set of values. He believed that an essential humanity allowed any person to understand why another one pursued the value that he pursued, even if the person did not pursue it himself or herself.
Here, I think, we find the fulcrum of Berlin's position. It lies in the capacity for empathy and toleration. We can feel what it would be like if we were that other person, pursuing a value that we do not ourselves choose. "Hence the possibility of human understanding." (57)
"All human beings must have some common values or they cease to be human, and also some different values else they cease to differ, as in fact they do." (57)
For Berlin, the critical difference between his pluralist stance and relativism was this: the common values were objective--"part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men's subjective fancies." (57)
Berlin ends this section on monism and pluralism with an impassioned denunciation of monism, which he restates as "the ancient belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if it is genuine, in the end must fit." (58)
Monism, he concludes, "is at the root of every extremism." (58)
Berlin in the next section of his essay explicated his two 1950s lectures on freedom, which perhaps won more public attention than anything else he wrote. In Two Concepts of Liberty, he examined negative and positive freedom (synonymous with liberty). Negative liberty (freedom from) was the absence of obstacles that block human action. Positive liberty (freedom to) was the individual's power to act for himself or herself. Berlin devoted much of his treatment of these two complementary ideas to their perversions in modern history.
In Historical Inevitability, Berlin examined the reverse of freedom, determinism. He offered the successes of natural science in support of determinism but could not accept it. As a practical matter, he thought it unlikely that humankind could revamp its moral vision--that a person is responsible for his or her actions--into esthetics. Berlin remained persuaded that the deterministic laws of nature did not totally exhaust human liberty to act.
In parting, Berlin took space to reject the vision of a perfect society. He based his rejection not only on his instinctively empirical cast of mind. He saw that the vision assumed that all the ultimate values were compatible. This, he decided, was wrong. Perfect liberty, for example, was not compatible with perfect equality. Nor was perfect knowledge with perfect happiness. In sum, Berlin concluded, "the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realized is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent." (60)
*******************************************
This review parallels an essay on the biography of Isaiah Berlin by Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life.
6 July 1999 Copyright © 1999 Richard P. Richter