Isaiah Berlin: A Life / The Proper Study of Mankind
Ignatieff, Michael & Berlin, Isaiah
Connoisseur of Error K S Isaiah Berlin: A Life Michael Ignatieff Metropolitan Books /356 pages / $30 The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays Isaiah Berlin; edited by Henry Hardy...
...while the heart of negative liberty is the absence of coercion, positive liberty may well require coercion, and of the most brutal kind, by those who know one's true nature better than one knows it himself...
...Prominent among Berlin's intellectual heroes are the nineteenth-century Russian expatriate writer Alexander Herzen...
...and Niccolà Machiavelli...
...Men are never more bloodthirsty, Berlin writes again and again, than when they are in the grip of an idea about the ultimate good: To be certain that one knows the single true way in which humanity ought to live bends one toward murderousness, for those who disagree cannot be permitted to impede mankind's progress toward unqualified happiness...
...that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience...
...Throughout his postwar writings, and most succinctly in "The Pursuit of the Ideal," written in 1988, Berlin contends that the perfect society is not only unattainable in practice but incoherent in principle...
...yet he stands by the romantic doctrine "that morality is molded by the will and that ends are created, not discovered," because it has done mankind the service of "permanently [shaking] the faith in universal, objective truth in matters of conduct, in the possibility of a perfect, harmonious society...
...The boy had never seen anything like this before, but he understood that the man was not going to come out of it alive...
...a member of the Board of Directors of the Royal Opera House...
...His Riga relations, including both his grandfathers, were among the thousands of Jews gunned down and dumped into mass graves by the Nazis and their Latvian collaborators in 1941...
...that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed...
...The eminences of journalism, academe, and Whitehall began to treat him like an eminence himself...
...The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence...
...sadly, they do not fill the need for what is lacking...
...As a historian of ideas, the first Oxford had seen, he would in fact be more truly a philosopher than when he had consorted with the Brethren...
...The connoisseurs of error emphasize the differences between one man and the next, or one people and the next, while philosophers of the one way undertake to discern what all men have in common...
...If men are to avoid the devastation and torment into which their most grandiose political innovations plunged them, they must be willing to make the necessary accommodations...
...The great world was tempting, but Berlin knew he was made for the life of 70 April 1999 • The American Spectator thought...
...his alleged contact was of course his nephew...
...During the 1930's Berlin wrote a vigorously anti-Marxist book on Karl Marx, and he met regularly with a circle of logical positivist philosophers, the Brethren, who were bent on cleansing philosophy of inane metaphysical speculation...
...Autres temps, autres moeurs...
...Like many of his Oxford colleagues, he went to work for the British government when war broke out, and the weekly dispatches he wrote from Washington about the American political scene caught the admiring eye of Churchill himself...
...only after lunch was over did Churchill learn the reason why...
...He told his Cabinet the story, word got out to the press, and Isaiah Berlin suddenly became famous, if not quite as famous as Irving...
...she would write a cycle of love poems, Cinque, in memory of their chaste yet spellbindingly erotic encounter...
...David Ben Gurion entreated him, unsuccessfully, to give up England and to become the director of the Israeli Foreign Office...
...Berlin's description of Alexander Herzen — who was, despite his ardent socialistic convictions, perhaps the man Berlin most esteemed—encapsulates Berlin's own belief and unbelief as tellingly as it does Herzen's: He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself...
...Marx's faith in his own synoptic vision of an orderly, disciplined, self-directing society, destined to arise out of the inevitable self-destruction of the irrational and chaotic world of the present, was of that boundless, absolute kind which puts an end to all questions and dissolves all difficulties...
...However, his belief that tolerant liberalism is the best conceivable political order because it utterly suits a world of irremediable moral uncertainty is half-true at best, though it is the kind of thing bound to draw a crowd...
...He was drawn to ideas that made themselves felt in the world...
...The predominant tendency in Western thought The American Spectator • April 1999 71 since Plato has as its fundamental premise that "truth, light are the same everywhere...
...If the twentieth century has taught him anything, it is a sure knowledge of what is bad, or at least of what is monstrous...
...Each man must be granted his singular way of knowing the 44 Berlin thought what all others would have thought had they only been intelligent enough...
...Pouring forth their souls for hours, they talked about all that Russia, and particularly Russian literature, meant Men are most bloodthirsty, he wrote, when in the grip of an idea about the ultimate good...
...that men have to make such tragic choices, that they are plagued by "the unavoidability of conflicting ends," moves him to the same mournful resignation...
...Released after the death of Stalin, the uncle happened to see one of his torturers out on the street one day, had a heart attack, and fell down dead...
...Berlin tended to be tight-lipped about the Holocaust, and it was Communism much more than Nazism that prompted his eloquent condemnation of totalitarianism and defense of liberty...
...Berlin leaves no doubt about which sort of freedom he prefers, and as usual he cites a revered precursor to underwrite his preference...
...After the war, he worked on the tricky job of collating translations of the United Nations Charter, and averted some cunning Soviet mischief...
...states), "Ich hasse diese Scheissemusik...
...Yet Berlin's understanding of liberty is not as profound or subtle or original as 72 AprApri 1 1999 • The American Spectator his warmest admirers would have it...
...Berlin's theoretical objection is definitive in a way that a strictly practical objection is not: This world is simply not the sort of place where such a project could be rationally conceived...
...He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion...
...The savagery came very close to home...
...Negative liberty is not enough for those who must have liberation...
...Some whom he loved were not so lucky...
...During his trip to the Soviet Union in 1945, he spent a night rapt in conversation with the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova...
...In the final chapter of Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), "English Liberty in America," Santayana writes that Englishmen and Americans willingly sacrifice that portion of their liberty which certain of their countrymen would find insufferable if it were indulged without restraint...
...for without conviction, without some antipathetic feeling, there was, he thought, no deep conviction...
...The oppressed have to be freed from their oppressors' uncharitable thoughts about them...
...In the name of tolerance, no opposition can be tolerated...
...This is eloquence so enchanting that one feels almost churlish remarking the speciousness of the reasoning here, which is attributed to Herz en but is tacitly approved by Berlin...
...a lecturer on BBC Radio, heard by hundreds of thousands of listeners...
...A Muscovite uncle of his, whom Berlin visited in 1945, was unjustly imprisoned several years for working for British Intelligence...
...Berlin attempts to evade the charge of relativism by force of will: Acting as though one's invented beliefs were really true makes them so...
...logical positivism, which had seemed admirably rigorous and scientific, he came to find attenuated and uninspiring...
...1 world and living in it...
...There is little he has to say about liberty that the American philosopher George Santayana has not said before, and Santayana has rather more to say besides...
...The conviction that there is one right way for men to live dies hard...
...He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were none the less binding upon those who lived in their light...
...In Berlin's view, the human condition is tragic, but there is tragedy and there is tragedy: The tragic losses that the compromise and renunciation essential to a liberal society entail are decidedly less awful than the havoc caused by utopian projects to reshape man into some final, flawless incarnation...
...About the ends of life, what he called "the Great Goods," Berlin had little to say (except to note, every chance he got, that they were in perpetual conflict), because he turned his mind chiefly to the means of avoiding the greatest evils...
...his vocation was not only to record what other men had thought, but to search for needed wisdom, for knowledge of how men ought to live...
...The foremost concern of his political thought was how to keep men from slaughtering each other over some seductive illusion...
...Perhaps he was merely the most intelligent man to subscribe to one particular sort of error that our time finds especially congenial...
...Churchill consulted him on the writing of The Second World War, and took his advice...
...Were it in fact possible to establish a perfect society, Berlin writes, any sacrifice would be justified: Tens of millions of broken eggs might be needed to make the omelet of universal happiness, but then the feast would last forever and leave everyone satisfied...
...S everity that does not balk at savagery, the abolition of ordinary moral qualms in the name of the highest morality, characterize not only Marx's descendants but also his fiercestadversaries—the Fascists—and mark them both as the enemies of "tolerant liberalism in every sphere...
...How significant a thinker was Berlin...
...Ayer was introduced at a London party in the early 1950's as "the cleverest man in England," a bedazzled new acquaintance declared, "Oh, so you must be Isaiah Berlin...
...It was his flair for more worldly concerns, with the help of a preposterous piece of luck, that first earned Berlin a nationwide reputation for brilliance...
...Berlin got off to an early start, demonstrating his powers of discrimination at the age of three, when he brought the dancing at a wedding reception in his native Riga to a halt by screaming repeatedly at full throttle (in the German spoken by the educated classes of the Baltic ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...
...such freedom will not make them happy, but it is really all they have in a godless, meaningless world that was plainly not meant for their satisfaction...
...Berlin had never read her poetry—she had been refused publication since 1925 — and she was twenty years older than he, but they were smitten with each other...
...Berlin had a taste for this beguiling austerity, not to say penury, of mind...
...7 to them...
...Santayana is well aware of what is lost by such freely made concessions to the opinion of others...
...to call homosexuality sinful is to endorse the murder of gay men...
...There is no ultimate good for men...
...founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford...
...This last sentence could have been written by Berlin...
...Berlin enjoys such acclaim among certain liberal intellectuals not so much because he was uncommonly discerning or deep, as because he thought the thoughts that everybody else would have thought if only they had been intelligent enough...
...Berlin has a penchant for those thinkers who might be called connoisseurs of error, which to their minds, and to his, is not error after all but the inexhaustible plenitude of human choice and invention...
...he went off to the Soviet Union in 1945 to gather information for the definitive dispatch on Soviet-AngloAmerican relations...
...Fired in no small part by Akhmatova's example, Berlin became an unrelenting enemy of Soviet tyranny and a stalwart upholder of democratic freedom...
...With such choices to make, how can a man know how to choose...
...In 1944 Churchill heard Berlin was in London, and invited him to lunch...
...The one-way philosophical mind, so paltry and so proud, considers its supreme accomplishment to be the reduction of the world's immeasurable richness to a comprehensible uniformity...
...This is a distinction of the utmost importance...
...Some among the Great Goods cannot live together...
...but he was clearly meant for other things...
...The good, however, is more ticklish and elusive...
...This is anathema to the high priests of the new liberal orthodoxy...
...Sincerity and integrity are what liberal men have instead of truth...
...As for Berlin himself, his biographer and assorted memorialists agree that he was without question a happy man, whose principal regret was that he could not live forever...
...Then and for many years after, Berlin (19o9-1997) enjoyed the distinction of being most everybody's idea—in Oxford, in London, even in New York—of the finest mind around...
...Berlin's understanding of liberty, tolerance, and variety shows the moral imperatives of fin de siecle liberal decadence for the rant and posturing that they really are...
...The American Spectator • April 1999 73...
...only tolerate...
...To speak out against abortion, they proclaim, is to endorse the murder of abortionists...
...In tolerant liberalism he found a sanctuary from the unspeakable, and he came to believe that liberalism was the political arrangement best fitted to the nature of things: As the quest for the one true good is doomed to failure, men must be free to choose among the various goods that are available...
...Under such daunting circumstances, the good can only be what a man makes it...
...disapprove, think ill of, if need be mock or despise, but tolerate...
...Utopian prophets who think they are being perfectly reasonable have not in fact reasoned things through...
...edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer Farrar, Straus & Giroux 667 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas W hen the Oxford philosopher A.J...
...they scorned questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of the good, and confined themselves to matters that were empirically verifiable or logically provable...
...it is only error that has myriad forms...
...the divine mind that Herder writes of, and the sort of human mind that imitates it, delight in the greatest possible creativity and variety...
...In February 1917 the seven-year-old Berlin witnessed a Czarist policeman squirming in terror as a pack of revolutionaries frogmarched him down a Petrograd street...
...and without deep conviction there were no ends of life, and then the awful abyss on the edge of which he had himself once stood would yawn before us...
...His demolition of utopian totalitarianism and his defense of tolerant liberalism were not only right but courageous...
...Ignatieff writes that Berlin was always to cherish his meeting with Akhmatova as "the most important event in his life...
...Berlin sees the danger into which this romantic irrationalism can lead...
...Einstein met Berlin once and said of him afterward that he seemed "a kind of spectator in God's big but mostly not attractive theater...
...Accused by some of being a relativist, Berlin adamantly protests that he is not, and he is right, in part...
...That is a conceptual truth...
...Herder asserts that, where the mind of man labors to perceive similarities among essentially dissimilar objects, God sees every created thing in its radiant uniqueness...
...When, for instance, liberty and equality collide—"total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs" — something has got to give...
...There is today not a more clever man in England, however one might wish there were...
...Tolerant liberalism—the regime of peaceable, moderate men reconciled to their imperfection—is Berlin's watchword...
...However, Churchill and his wife somehow got their signals crossed, and the Berlin who joined them was not Isaiah, but Irving...
...We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss...
...Some modem liberals admire Berlin for admiring Mill, but certain things that Berlin admires in Mill do not really suit them: He asked us not necessarily to respect the views of others—very far from it—only to try to understand and tolerate them...
...By the time he was seven (and living in Petrograd), he was discussing contemporary Russian painting, and at ten he read Tolstoy, loving War and Peace but baffled by Anna Karenina...
...president of the British Academy...
...Berlin's antipathy toward this sublime bloody-mindedness is already evident in his 1939 study of Marx, whom he ranks among the great authoritarian founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who interpret the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle, denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it...
...In England Berlin found a refuge, if an embattled one, from the worst horrors visited upon the continent...
...the eighteenth-century German Romantic Johann Gottfried Herder...
...If the truth is that there is no God, then man can create all the values he likes, and change his mind about which one he prefers as often as he likes...
...Now that his fine biographer, Michael Ignatieff, and the editors of a splendid collection of his essays, gathered from some ten volumes of his works, have contributed to the chorus of approbation, it is time to ask: Just how clever was he...
...Those who seek for some deep cosmic all-embracing...libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken," he declared...
...Churchill was unaware of the substitution, and the conversation took some farcical turns...
...All the prizes that go to Englishmen of eminent intellect came his way: He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford...
...The full flowering of human variety presupposes freedom...
...Berlin writes not only to steel the democracies' resistance to Communism, but to arm moderate men against the utopian temptation in whatever forms it may assume...
...In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, and in 1932 he was elected a fellow of All Souls, the blessed college without students, whose members are free to pursue their work just as they choose...
...Berlin puts one to the test, makes one question what one really does know...
...The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way," said the most celebrated of its champions, John Stuart Mill...
...There is, of course, no good reason why any man-made value, whether common to one's time and place or entirely of one's own devising, should be morally binding just as surely as God's own truth...
...Berlin's was a philosopher's happiness, which Aristotle extols in the Nicomachean Ethics as the greatest human good...
...He would devote himself to thinking about why a significant part of the civilized world had turned feral in his lifetime, and about what was necessary to preserve civilization from this predilection for savagery...
...Rather, there are many goods, many desirable ends that men pursue, and it is not possible to realize them all at once...
...Perhaps Berlin's most famous and influential essay is "Two Concepts of Liberty," in which he distinguishes between negative liberty, which is simply freedom to act as one chooses, and positive liberty, which is liberation from one's baser inclinations and fulfillment of one's true nature...
...Absolute liberty and English liberty are incompatible, and mankind must make a painful and a brave choice between them...
...that to sacrifice the present or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice...
...John Stuart Mill...
...Yet philosophy as it was being done at Oxford had lost its charm for him...
...the Neapolitan author of The New Science, Giambattista Vico...
...Rejecting the smug rationalist certainties of the French philosophes, Herder exclaims, "I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live...
...Yet the charm of his mind and of his rhetorical gifts is so winning that considerable powers of resistance are needed if one is not to crumple before it...
...Her defiance of the Soviet regime, which she paid for dearly, commanded Berlin's enduring regard...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
