Isaiah Berlin

[reason.on]

I've just this weekend begun to read Isaiah Berlin's *Four Essays on Liberty* (1969), and with this being my first significant exposure to Berlin's ideas, I'm curious to know what others think of his work. I'm already noticing (from the introduction alone) some parallels with Rand's thinking, as well as with other thinkers such as Branden, Searle, and even GHS (with respect to the nature of history, and the historian).

Does anyone have any reflections on Berlin that they would like to share?

RCR

[reason.on]

A few selective quotes to chew on:

*Four Essays on Liberty*, "Introduction".

Isaiah Berlin

There is clearly no need for historians formally to pronounce moral judgements [...] They are under no obligation as historians to inform their readers that Hitler did harm to mankind, whereas Pasteur did good (or whatever they may think the case). The very use of normal language cannot avoid conveying what the author regards as commonplace or monstrous, decisive or trivial, exhilarating or depressing. In describing what occurred I can say that so many million men were brutally done to death; or alternatively, that they perished; laid down their lives; were massacred; or simply, that the population of Europe was reduced, or that its average age was lowered; or that many men lost their lives. None of these descriptions of what took place is wholly neutral: all carry moral implications. What the historian says, will, however careful he may be to use purely descriptive language, sooner or later convey his attitude. Detachment is itself a moral position. The use of neutral language ('Himmler caused many persons to be asphyxiated') conveys its own ethical tone.

Objectivity of moral judgement seems to depend on (almost to consist in) the degree of constancy in human responses. This notion cannot in principle be made sharp and unalterable. Its edges remain blurred. Moral categories--and categories of value in general--are nothing like as firm and ineradicable as those of, say, the perception of the material world, but neither are they as relative or as fluid as some writers have too easily, in the reaction against the dogmatism of the classical objectivists, tended to assume. A minimum of common moral ground--interrelated concepts and categories--is intrinsic to human communication. What they are, how flexible, how far liable to change under the impact of what 'forces'--these are empirical questions, in a region claimed by moral psychology and historical and social anthropology, fascinating, important, and insufficiently explored.

[snip]

To frighten human beings by suggesting to them that they are in the grip of impersonal forces over which they have little or no control is to breed myths, ostensibly in order to kill other figments--the notion of supernatural forces, or of all-powerful individual, or of the hidden hand. It is to invent entities, to propagate faith in unalterable patterns of events for which the empirical evidence is, to say the least, insufficient, and which by relieving individuals of the burdens of personal responsibility breeds irrational passivity in some, and no less irrational fanatical activity in others; for nothing is more inspiring than the certainty that the stars in their courses are fighting for one's cause, that 'History', or 'social forces', or 'the wave of the future' are with one, bearing one aloft and forward. This way of thinking and speaking is one which it is the great merit of modern empiricism to have exposed. If my essay has any polemical thrust, it is to discredit metaphysical constructions of this kind. If to speak of men solely in terms of statistical probabilities--ignoring too much of what is specifically human in men--evaluations, choices, differing visions of life, is an exaggerated application of scientific method, a gratuitous behaviourism, it is no less misleading to appeal to imaginary forces. The former has its place; it describes, classifies, predicts, even if it does not explain. The latter explains indeed, but in occult, what can only call neo-animistic, terms.

[snip]

We seem to need a new model, a schema which will rescue the evidence of moral consciousness from the beds of Procrustes provided by the obsessive framework of the traditional discussions. All efforts to break away from the old obstructive analogies, or (to use a familiar terminology) the rules of an inappropriate language game, have so far proved abortive. This needs philosophical imagination of the first order, which in this case is still to seek.

RCR

Edited September 11, 2006 by R. Christian Ross

[Barbara Branden]

Interesting material, Christian. I'll read "Four Essays on Liberty."

This is not meant as a criticism of Berlin's ideas -- I don't know what they are -- but I had a hilarious television encounter with him. Years ago, I happened to turn on television to a program on which he was being interviewed. (I later learned that he was known to have a British accent that was almost unintelligible, even to his own countrymen.) To my astonishment, I could not undertand a single word he said, and I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with either my hearing or my understanding -- when I saw that the hideously embarrassed man, an American, who was interviewing him was in the same boat I was. I felt terribly sorry for the interviewer, but it was killingly funny to see him asking polite questions, then trying in vain to look as if he were intelligent and informed enough to understood the answer, then struggling to find another question which wouldn't appear to be as totally unrelated to the last response as it necessarily was, and then to listen to Berlin giving what appeared to be a carefully framed and thought-out answer which might as well have been stated in Chinese. I often wondered if Berlin ever discovered that the entire interview was a lost cause.

Does anyone know what part of Britain Berlin came from -- and if indeed it was only his accent that made his words impossible to understand?

Barbara

[reason.on]

In light of GHS's recent and exasperating run-in with the "children of the corn" on a variety of familiar issues (including moral perfection and the nature of heritics), I wanted to also post the following from Berlin, which seems to me to cast an interesting perspective on what I see as the nature of the goings on in the creppy cornfield down the road...

I'm also inlcuding, for an interesting contrast, a related quote from Rand (which, I had previously posted under a now deleted thread).

[J.S.] Mill does seem to have convinced himself that there exists such a thing as attainable, communicable, objective truth in the field of value judgements; but that the conditions for its discovery do not exist save in a society which provides a sufficient degree of individual liberty, particularly of inquiry and discussion. This is simply the old objectivist thesis, in an empirical form, with a special rider about the need for individual liberty as a necessary condition for the attainment of this final goal. My thesis is not this at all; but that, since some values may conflict intrinsically, the very notion that a pattern must in principle be discoverable in which they are all rendered harmonious is founded on a false a priori view of what the world is like.

If I am right in this, and the human condition is such that men cannot always avoid choices, they cannot avoid them not merely for the obvious reasons which philosophers have seldom ignored, namely that there are many possible courses of action and forms of life worth living, and therefore to choose between them is part of being rational or capable of moral judgement; they cannot avoid choice for one central reason (which is, in the ordinary sense, conceptual, not empirical), namely that ends collide; that one cannot have everything. Whence it follows that the very concept of an ideal life, a life in which nothing of value need be lost or sacrificed, in which all rational (or virtuous, or otherwise legitimate) wishes must be capable of being truly satisfied--this classical vision is not merely Utopian, but incoherent. The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament, If this is so, it undermines all theories according to which the value of free choice derives from the fact that without it we cannot attain to the perfect life; with the implication that once such perfection has been reached the need for choice between alternatives withers away.

On this view, choice, like the party system, or the right to vote against the nominees of the ruling party, becomes obsolete, in the perfect Platonic or theocratic or Jacobin or communist society, where any sign of the recrudescence of disagreement is a symptom of error and vice. For there is only one possible path for the perfectly rational man, since there are now no beguiling illusions, no conflicts, no incongruities, no surprises, no genuine, unpredictable novelty; everything is still and perfect in the universe governed by what Kant called the Holy Will. Whether or not this calm and tideless sea is conceivable or not, it does not resemble the real world in terms of which alone we conceive men's nature and their values. Given things as we know them, and have known them during recorded human history, capacity for choosing is intrinsic to rationality, if rationality entails normal ability to apprehend the real world. To move in a frictionless medium, desiring only what one can attain, not tempted by alternatives, never seeking incompatible ends, is to live in a coherent fantasy. To offer it as the ideal is to seek to dehumanize men, to turn them into the brainwashed, contented beings of Aldous Huxley's celebrated nightmare.

I have always understood morality to apply only to the actions open to man's choice. I have always thought that morality cannot be divorced from free will. Therefore, man's essential nature is his ability to conceive a good idea or a depraved one. The nature of a being endowed with free will is that he is capable of both good and evil and must make the choice. If he is essentially incapable of evil, then he is good automatically, by predetermination, good without any choice about it---and if so, then he is outside the realm of morality. A robot, capable only of "good" (?) actions, is neither good nor evil. The fact that man can conceive a depraved idea does not make man depraved by nature. It merely leaves him what he is--free. He cannot be guilty by potentiality. He becomes guilty only by the choices he makes--if and when he chooses evil.

[snip]

Every man creates his own moral character by the choices he makes.

[all emphasis original]

RCR

Edited September 11, 2006 by R. Christian Ross

[reason.on]

Does anyone know what part of Britain Berlin came from -- and if indeed it was only his accent that made his words impossible to understand?

Barbara

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin

Berlin was born into a Jewish family, the son of Mendel Berlin, a timber merchant, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok. He spent his childhood in Riga, Latvia and St Petersburg (then called Petrograd), witnessing the Russian Revolution of 1917, and arriving with his family in Britain in 1921. In the United Kingdom, he was educated at St Paul's School, London, a private school, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (Classics) and PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). He was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for the British Information Services in New York (1940—2), and the British Embassies in Washington, D.C. (1942—6) and Moscow (1945—6). In 1956, he married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg. Berlin was a friend of the British philosopher Alfred Ayer.

Berlin died in Oxford in 1997, aged 88.[1]

RCR