My Intellectual Path
The New York Review of
Books; New York; May 14, 1998; Isaiah Berlin;
Berlin had written nothing substantial since 1988, when his intellectual credo, "On the Pursuit of
the Ideal" (a response to the award of the first Agnelli Prize for his contribution to ethics),
appeared in The New York Review. Although his intellect was undiminished, and he had
continued to compose short occasional pieces, it seemed clear that-reasonably enough in his
eighties--he had in effect laid down his authorial pen.
But the Chinese project caught his imagination: he regarded this new readership as important,
and felt an obligation to address it. He told the professor that he would try to write something.
With a single sheet of notes before him, he dictated a first draft onto cassette. When he had
approved an edited transcript, making a few final insertions and adjustments, he said, with his
characteristic distaste for revisiting his own work, that he did not wish to see the piece again. It
was to be the last essay he wrote.
Contributors to the volume were asked to offer guidance to readers who might wish to study
their work further. Berlin simply directed them to two other essays of his, the Agnelli Prize essay
and "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will" (1975). Both are to be found in his 1990 collection,
The Crooked Timber of Humanity, recently reissued by Princeton University Press.
-Henry Hardy
1. Oxford Philosophy before the Second World War
My interest in philosophical issues started when I was an undergraduate
at Oxford in the late 1920s and early 1930s, because philosophy was
part of the course which at that time a great many students in Oxford
pursued. As a result of a continuing interest in this field I was
appointed in 1932 to teach philosophy, and my views at that time were
naturally influenced by the kind of discussions that my philosophical
contemporaries held in Oxford. There were plenty of other issues in
philosophy, but as it happens the topics which my colleagues and I
concentrated on were the fruits of a return to empiricism which began
to dominate British philosophy before the First World War, under the
influence mainly of two celebrated Cambridge philosophers, G.E. Moore
and Bertrand Russell.
Verificationism
The first topic which occupied our attention in the middle and late
1930s was the nature of meaning- its relation to truth and falsehood,
knowledge and opinion, and in particular the test of meaning in terms
of the verifiability of the propositions in which it was expressed. The
impulsion toward this topic came from the members of the Vienna School,
themselves disciples of Russell and greatly influenced by thinkers such
as Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Schlick. The fashionable view was that the
meaning of a proposition was the way in which it was verifiable- that
if there was no way whatever of verifying what was being said, it was
not a statement capable of truth or falsehood, not factual, and
therefore either meaningless or a case of some other use of language,
as seen in commands or expressions of desire, or in imaginative
literature, or in other forms of expression which did not lay claim to
empirical truth.
I was influenced by this school in the sense of being absorbed in the
problems and theories which it generated, but I never became a true
disciple. I always believed that statements that could be true or false
or plausible or dubious or interesting, while indeed they did relate to
the world as empirically conceived (and I have never conceived of the
world in any other way, from then to the present day), were
nevertheless not necessarily capable of being verified by some simple
knockdown criterion, as the Vienna School and their logical positivist
followers asserted. From the beginning I felt that general propositions
were not verifiable in that way. Statements, whether in ordinary use or
in the natural sciences (which were the ideal of the Vienna School),
could be perfectly meaningful without being strictly verifiable. If I
said "All swans are white," I would never know if I knew this about all
the swans there were, or whether the number of swans might not be
infinite; a black swan no doubt refuted this generalization, but its
positive verification in the full sense seemed to me unattainable;
nevertheless it would be absurd to say that it had no meaning. The same
was true about hypothetical propositions, and still more so about
unfulfilled hypotheticals, of which it was plainly paradoxical to
maintain that they could be shown to be true or false by empirical
observation; yet they were clearly meaningful.
I thought of a great many other statements of this kind, which clearly
had meaning in the full sense of the word, but whose meaning escaped
the narrow criterion proposed, that of direct empirical observation-
the world of the senses. Consequently, though I took a lively part in
these discussions (indeed, what later came to be called Oxford
Philosophy began in my rooms in the evenings, at gatherings attended by
such later celebrated philosophers as A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin, and
Stuart Hampshire, influenced as they all were by Oxford empiricism, and
to some degree by Oxford realism- that is, the belief that the external
world is independent of human observers), nevertheless I remained a
heretic, though a friendly one. I have never departed from the views I held at that time,
and still believe that while empirical experience is all that words can
express that there is no other reality- nevertheless verifiability is
not the only, or indeed the most plausible, criterion of knowledge or
beliefs or hypotheses. This has remained with me for the rest of my life, and has colored everything else that I have thought.
Another topic which I offered for the attention of my young colleagues
was the status of such propositions as "This pink (shade) is more like
this vermilion than it is like this black." If generalized, it was
clear that this was a truth which no experience was likely to refute-
the relations of visible colors being fixed. At the same time the
general proposition could not be called a priori because it did not proceed formally from any
definitions, and did not therefore belong to the formal disciplines of
logic or mathematics, in which alone a priori propositions, then regarded as tautologies,
belong. So we had found a universal truth in the empirical sphere. What
were the definitions of "pink," "vermilion," and the rest? They had
none. The colors could be recognized only by looking, so that their
definitions were classified as ostensive, and from such definitions
nothing logically followed. This came close to the old problem of
Kant's synthetic a priori propositions, and we discussed this and its analogues for many months. I was convinced that my proposition was, if not strictly
a priori,
self-evidently true, and that its contradictory was not intelligible.
Whether my colleagues ever raised the matter again I do not know, but
the topic entered formally into the discussions held by us at the time.
It corresponded to a view of Russell's embodied in a work called The Limits of Empiricism.
Phenomenalism
The other main topic that my contemporaries discussed was
phenomenalism- that is, the question of whether human experience was
confined to that provided by the senses, as was taught by the British
philosophers Berkeley and Hume (and in some of their writings by Mill
and Russell), or whether there existed a reality independent of
sensible experience. For some philosophers, like Locke and his
followers, there was such a reality, although it was not directly
accessible to us- a reality which caused the sensible experiences which
are all that we can directly know. Other philosophers held that the
external world was a material reality which could be perceived
directly, or misperceived as the case might be: this was called
realism, as opposed to the view that our world was entirely created by
human faculties- reason, imagination, and the like - which was called
idealism, in which I never believed. I have never believed in any
metaphysical truths- whether rationalist truths, as expounded by
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and, in his own very different fashion,
Kant, or the truths of (objective) idealism, the fathers of which are
Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel, who still have their disciples.
Thus meaning, truth, and the nature of the external world were the
topics which I thought about, and to some extent wrote about- and some
of my views on them have been published.1
One of the intellectual phenomena which made the greatest impact on me
was the universal search by philosophers for absolute certainty, for
answers which could not be doubted, for total intellectual security.
This from the very beginning appeared to me to be an illusory quest. No
matter how solidly based, widespread, inescapable, "self-evident" a
conclusion or a direct datum may seem to be, it is always possible to
conceive that something could modify or indeed upset it, even if one
cannot at the moment imagine what this might be. And this suspicion
that a great deal of philosophy was set on an illusory path later came
to dominate my ideas in a quite new and different connection.
While thus engaged in teaching and discussing the kind of philosophy I
have outlined, I was commissioned to write a biography of Karl Marx.
Marx's philosophical views never appeared to me to be particularly
original or interesting, but my study of his views led me to
investigate his predecessors, in particular the French philosophes of
the eighteenth century- the first organized adversaries of dogmatism,
traditionalism, religion, superstition, ignorance, oppression. I
acquired an admiration for the great task which the thinkers of the Encyclopedie had set themselves, and for the great
work which they did to liberate men from darkness- clerical,
metaphysical, political, and the like. And although I came in due
course to oppose some of the bases of their common beliefs, I have
never lost my admiration for and sense of solidarity with the
Enlightenment of that period: what I came to be critical of, apart from
its empirical shortcomings, is some of its consequences, both logical
and social; I realized that Marx's dogmatism, and that of his
followers, in part derived from the certainties of the eighteenth
century Enlightenment.
2. History of Ideas and Political Theory
During the war I served as a British official. When I came back to
Oxford to teach philosophy, I became preoccupied with two central
problems. The first was monism- the central thesis of Western
philosophy from Plato to our day- and the second, the meaning and
application of the notion of freedom. I devoted a good deal of time to
each, and they shaped my thought for a good many years to come.
Monism
Dazzled by the spectacular successes of the natural sciences in their
own century and its predecessors, men such as Helvetius, Holbach,
d'Alembert, Condillac, and propagandists of genius such as Voltaire and
Rousseau, believed that, provided the right method was discovered,
truth of a fundamental kind could be uncovered about social, political,
moral, and personal life- truth of the kind that had scored such
triumphs in the investigations of the external world. The
Encyclopedists believed in scientific method as the only key to such
knowledge: Rousseau and others believed in eternal truths discovered by
introspective means. But however they differed, they belonged to a
generation which was convinced that it was on the path to the solution
of all the problems that had plagued mankind from its beginnings.
A wider thesis underlay this: namely, that to all true questions there
must be one true answer and one only, all the other answers being
false, for otherwise the questions cannot be genuine questions. There
must exist a path which leads clear thinkers to the correct answers to
these questions, as much in the moral, social, and political worlds as
in that of the natural sciences, whether it is the same method or not;
and once all the correct answers to the deepest moral, social, and
political questions that occupy (or should occupy) mankind are put
together, the result will represent the final solution to all the
problems of existence. Of course, we may never attain to these answers:
human beings may be too confused by their emotions, or too stupid, or
too unlucky, to be able to arrive at them; the answers may be too
difficult, the means may be lacking, the techniques too complicated to
discover; but however this may be, provided the questions are genuine,
the answers must exist. If we do not know, our successors may know; or
perhaps wise men in antiquity knew; and if they did not, perhaps Adam
in Paradise knew; or if he did not, the angels must know; and if even
they do not know, God must know the answers must be there.
If the answers to social, moral, and political questions are
discovered, then, knowing them for what they are - the truth- men
cannot fail to follow them, for they would have no temptation to do
otherwise. And so a perfect life can be conceived. It may not be
attainable, but in principle the conception must be capable of being
formed-indeed, the possibility of discovering the only true answers to
the great questions must in principle be believed in.
This creed was certainly not confined to the thinkers of the
Enlightenment, though the methods recommended by others differ. Plato
believed that mathematics was the route to truth, Aristotle, perhaps,
that it was biology; Jews and Christians sought the answers in sacred
books, in the pronouncements of divinely inspired teachers and the
visions of mystics; others believed that the laboratory and
mathematical methods could settle things; still others believed, like
Rousseau, that only the innocent human soul, the uncorrupted child, the
simple peasant would know the truth- better than the corrupt
inhabitants of societies ruined by civilization. But what they all
agreed about, as did their successors after the French Revolution, who
may have supposed the truth more difficult to obtain than their more
naive and optimistic predecessors (2), was that the laws of historical
development could be- and by then had been- discovered, that the
answers to the questions of how to live and what to do-morality, social
life, political organization, personal relationships- are all capable
of being organized in the light of the truths discovered by the correct
methods, whatever those may be.
This is a philosophia perennis-
what men, thinkers, have believed from the pre-Socratics to all the
reformers and revolutionaries of our own age. It is the central belief
on which human thought has rested for two millennia. For if no true
answers to questions exist, how can knowledge ever be attainable in any
province? This was the heart of European rational, and indeed
spiritual, thought for many ages. No matter that people differ so
widely, that cultures differ, moral and political views differ; no
matter that there is a vast variety of doctrines, religions,
moralities, ideas- all the same there must somewhere be a true answer
to the deepest questions that preoccupy mankind.
I do not know why I always felt skeptical about this almost universal
belief, but I did. It may be a matter of temperament, but so it
was.
Giambattista Vico
What first shook me was my discovery of the works of the
eighteenth-century Italian thinker Giambattista Vico. He was the first
philosopher, in my view, to have conceived the idea of cultures. Vico
wanted to understand the nature of historical knowledge, of history
itself: it was all very well to lean on the natural sciences as far as
the external world was concerned, but all they could provide us with
was an account of the behavior of rocks or tables or stars or
molecules. In thinking about the past, we go beyond behavior; we wish
to understand how human beings lived, and that means understanding
their motives, their fears and hopes and ambitions and loves and
hatreds to whom they prayed, how they expressed themselves in poetry,
in art, in religion. We are able to do this because we are ourselves
human, and understand our own inner life in these terms. We know how a
rock, or a table, behaves because we observe it and make conjectures
and verify them; but we do not know why the rock wishes to be as it is-
indeed, we think it has no capacity for wishing, or for any other
consciousness. But we do know why we are what we are, what we seek,
what frustrates us, what expresses our inmost feelings and beliefs; we
know more about ourselves than we shall ever know about rocks or
streams.
True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, not merely
what they are; and the more we delve into this, the more we realize
that the questions asked by the Homeric Greeks are different from the
questions asked by the Romans, that the questions asked by the Romans
differ from those asked in the Christian Middle Ages or in the
seventeenth-century scientific culture or Vico's own eighteenth-century
days. The questions differ, the answers differ, the aspirations differ;
the use of language, of symbols, differs; and the answers to one set of
questions do not answer, do not have much relevance to, the questions
of other cultures. Of course, Vico was a pious Roman Catholic, and he
believed that the Church alone could provide the answers. But be that
as it may, it did not prevent him from formulating the original idea
that cultures differ, that what matters to a fifth-century Greek is
very different from what matters to a Red Indian or a Chinese or a
scientist in an eighteenth-century laboratory; and therefore their
outlooks differ, and there are no universal answers to all their
questions. Of course there is a common human nature, otherwise men in
one age could not understand the literature or the art of another, or,
above all, its laws, about which Vico, as a jurist. knew most. But that
did not prevent there being a wide variety of cultural experience, so
that activity of one kind was relevant to activity of some other kind
within a single culture, but did not share such close links with the
parallel activity in another culture.
J. G. Herder
Then I read a far more relevant thinker, namely the German philosopher
and poet Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder was not the first (his
teacher, Johann Georg Hamann, has that honor) to deny the doctrine of
his French contemporaries that there are universal, timeless,
unquestionable truths which hold for all men, everywhere, at all times;
and that the differences are simply due to error and illusion, for the
truth is one and universal-"quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum
est."3
Herder believed that different cultures gave different answers to their
central questions. He was more interested in the humanities, the life
of the spirit, than in the external world, and he became convinced that
what was true for a Portuguese was not necessarily true for a Persian.
Montesquieu had begun to say this kind of thing, but even he, who
believed that men were shaped by environment, by what he called
"climate," was in the end a universalist- he believed that the central
truths were eternal, even if the answers to local and ephemeral
questions might be different. Herder laid it down that every culture
possesses its own "center of gravity"4; each culture has its own points
of reference; there is no reason why these cultures should fight each
other- universal toleration must be possible- but unification was
destruction. Nothing was worse than imperialism. Rome, which crushed
native civilizations in Asia Minor in order to produce one uniform
Roman culture, committed a crime. The world was a great garden in which
different flowers and plants grew, each in its own way, each with its
own claims and rights and past and future. From which it followed that
no matter what men had in common-and of course, again, there was a
common nature to some degree -there were no universally true answers,
as valid for one culture as for another.
Herder is the father of cultural nationalism. He is not a political
nationalist (that kind of nationalism had not developed in his time),
but he believed in the independence of cultures and the need to
preserve each in its uniqueness. He believed that the desire to belong
to a culture, something that united a group or a province or a nation,
was a basic human need, as deep as the desire for food or drink or
liberty; and that this need to belong to a community where you
understood what others said, where you could move freely, where you had
emotional as well as economic, social, and political bonds, was the
basis of developed, mature human life. Herder was not a relativist,
though he is often so described: he believed that there were basic
human goals and rules of behavior, but that they took wholly different
forms in different cultures, and that consequently, while there may
have been analogies, similarities, which made one culture intelligible
to another, cultures were not to be confused with each other- mankind
was not one but many, and the answers to the questions were many,
though there might be some central essence to them all which was one
and the same.
Romanticism and its Offspring
This idea was developed further by the Romantics, who said something
wholly new and disturbing: that ideals were not objective truths
written in heaven and needing to be understood, copied, practiced by
men; but that they were created by men. Values were not found, but
made; not discovered, but generated-that is what some of the German
Romantics certainly believed, as against the objectivist,
universalizing tendency of the superficial French. Uniqueness mattered.
A German poet writes poetry in German, in language which, in the course
of writing, he to some degree creates: he is not simply a writer in
German. The German artist is a maker of German paintings, poems,
dances-and so in all other cultures. A Russian thinker, Alexander
Herzen, once asked, "Where is the song before it is sung?"5 Where
indeed? "Nowhere" is the answer-one creates the song by singing it, by
composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it, step by
step. This is an aesthetic interpretation of morality and of life, not
an application of eternal models. Creation is all.
From this sprang all kinds of diverse movements- anarchism,
Romanticism, nationalism, fascism, hero worship. I make my own values,
maybe not consciously: and besides, who is "I"? For Byronic Romantics,
"I" is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adventurer, the outlaw,
he who defies society and accepted values, and follows his own-it may
be to his doom, but this is better than conformity, enslavement to
mediocrity. But for other thinkers "I" becomes something much more
metaphysical. It is a collective, a nation, a Church, a Party, a class,
an edifice in which I am only a stone, an organism of which I am only a
tiny living fragment. It is the creator; I myself matter only insofar
as I belong to the movement, the race, the nation, the class, the
Church; I do not signify as a true individual within this super-person
to whom my life is organically bound.
Hence German nationalism: I do this not because it is good or right or
because I like it- I do it because I am a German and this is the German
way to live. So also modern existentialism - I do it because I commit
myself to this form of existence. Nothing makes me; I do not do it
because it is an objective order which I obey, or because of universal
rules to which I must adhere; I do it because I create my own life as I
do; being what I am, I give it direction and I am responsible for
it.
Denial of universal values, this emphasis on being above all an element
in, and loyal to, a super-self, is a dangerous moment in European
history, and has led to a great deal that has been destructive and
sinister in modern times; this is where it begins, in the political
ruminations and theories of the earliest German Romantics and their
disciples in France and elsewhere.6
I never for a moment accepted the idea of these super-egos, but I
recognized their importance in modern thought and action. Slogans like
"Not I but the Party," "Not I but the Church," "My country right or
wrong, but my country" have inflicted a wound on the central faith of
human thought as I outlined it above-that the truth is universal,
eternal, for all men at all times-from which it has never recovered.
Mankind not as an object but as a subject, an ever-moving spirit,
self-creating and self-moving, a self-composed drama in many acts,
which, according to Marx, will end in some kind of perfection-all this
issues from the Romantic revolution. While I reject this huge
metaphysical interpretation of human life in toto- I remain an
empiricist, and know only what I am able to experience, or think I
could experience, and do not begin to believe in supra-individual
entities -nevertheless I own that it made some impact on me, in the
following way.
Pluralism
I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there
is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist;
I do not say, "I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am
in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps," each of us
with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated.
This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality
of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.
There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values
which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human
character, is finite -let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite,
whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man
pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why
he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to
be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human
understanding.
I think these values are objective; that is to say, their nature, the
pursuit of them, is part of what it is to be a human being, and this is
an objective given. The fact that men are men and women are women and
not dogs or cats or tables or chairs is an objective fact; and part of
this objective fact is that there are certain values, and only those
values, which men, while remaining men, can pursue. If I am a man or a
woman with sufficient imagination (and this I do need), I can enter
into a value system which is not my own, but which is nevertheless
something I can conceive of men pursuing while remaining human, while
remaining creatures with whom I can communicate, with whom I have some
common values- for 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.
That is why pluralism is not relativism- the multiple values are
objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary
creations of men's subjective fancies. Nevertheless, of course, if I
pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is
damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate,
for myself and others; in which case I may attack it, I may even- in
extreme cases- have to go to war against it. But I still recognize it
as a human pursuit. I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand
how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality,
one could come to believe that they are the only salvation. Of course
they have to be fought, by war if need be, but I do not regard the
Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as
wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in
believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central, or
that Nordic races alone are truly creative, and so forth. I see how,
with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men
can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable
crimes.
If pluralism is a valid view, and respect between systems of values
which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible, then
toleration and liberal consequences follow, as they do not either from
monism (only one set of values is true, all the others are false) or
from relativism (my values are mine, yours are yours, and if we clash,
too bad, neither of us can claim to be right). My political pluralism
is a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots
of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far
for human toleration.
So with nationalism: the sense of belonging to a nation seems to me
quite natural and not in itself to be condemned, or even criticized.
But in its inflamed condition- my nation is better than yours, I know
how the world should be shaped and you must yield because you do not,
because you are inferior to me, because my nation is top and yours is
far, far below mine and must offer itself as material to mine, which is
the only nation entitled to create the best possible world- it is a
form of pathological extremism which can lead, and has led, to
unimaginable horrors, and is totally incompatible with the kind of
pluralism which I have attempted to describe.
It may be of interest to remark, incidentally, that there are certain
values that we in our world accept which were probably created by early
Romanticism and did not exist before: for example, the idea that
variety is a good thing, that a society in which many opinions are
held, and those holding different opinions are tolerant of each other,
is better than a monolithic society in which one opinion is binding on
everyone. Nobody before the eighteenth century could have accepted
that: the truth was one and the idea of variety was inimical to it.
Again, the idea of sincerity, as a value, is something new. It was
always right to be a martyr to the truth, but only to the truth:
Muslims who died for Islam were poor, foolish, misled creatures who
died for nonsense; so, for Catholics, were Protestants and Jews and
pagans; and the fact that they held their beliefs sincerely made them
no better- what was important was to be right. In discovering the
truth, as in every other walk of life, success was what was important,
not motive. If a man says to you that he believes that twice two is
seventeen, and someone says, "You know, he doesn't do it to annoy you,
he doesn't do it because he wants to show off or because he has been
paid to say it- he truly believes, he is a sincere believer," you would
say, "This makes it no better, he is talking irrational nonsense." That
is what Protestants were doing, in the view of Catholics, and vice
versa. The more sincere, the more dangerous; no marks were given for
sincerity until the notion that there is more than one answer to a
question- that is, pluralism- became more widespread. That is what led
value to be set on motive rather than on consequence, on sincerity
rather than on success.
The enemy of pluralism is monism: the ancient belief that there is a
single harmony of truths into which everything, if it is genuine, in
the end must fit. The consequence of this belief (which is something
different from, but akin to, what Karl Popper called essentialism- to
him the root of all evil) is that those who know should command those
who do not. Those who know the answers to some of the great problems of
mankind must be obeyed, for they alone know how society should be
organized, how individual lives should be lived, how culture should be
developed. This is the old Platonic belief in the philosopher kings,
who were entitled to give orders to others. There have always been
thinkers who hold that if only scientists, or scientifically trained
persons, could be put in charge of things, the world would be vastly
improved. To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason,
has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an
elite which robs the majority of its essential liberties.
Someone once remarked that in the old days men and women were brought
as sacrifices to a variety of gods; for these, the modern age has
substituted new idols: isms. To cause pain, to kill, to torture are in
general rightly condemned; but if these things are done not for my
personal benefit but for an ism-socialism, nationalism, fascism,
communism, fanatically held religious belief, or progress, or the
fulfillment of the laws of history-then they are in order. Most
revolutionaries believe, covertly or overtly, that in order to create
the ideal world eggs must be broken, otherwise one cannot obtain the
omelette. Eggs are certainly broken -never more violently or
ubiquitously than in our times- but the omelette is far to seek, it
recedes into an infinite distance. That is one of the corollaries of
unbridled monism, as I call it; some call it fanaticism, but monism is
at the root of every extremism.
Freedom
Political freedom is a topic to which I devoted two lectures during the
1950s. The later of these, entitled "Two Concepts of Liberty,"7
inaugurated my Oxford Professorship, and its gist was to distinguish
between two notions of liberty (or freedom- the terms are used
interchangeably), negative and positive. By negative liberty I meant
the absence of obstacles which block human action. Quite apart from
obstacles created by the external world, or by the biological,
physiological, psychological laws which govern human beings, there is
lack of political freedom- the central topic of my lecture- where the
obstacles are man-made, whether deliberately or unintentionally. The
extent of negative liberty depends on the degree to which such man-made
obstacles are absent- on the degree to which I am free to go down this
or that path without being prevented from doing so by man-made
institutions or disciplines, or by the activities of specific human
beings.
It is not enough to say that negative freedom simply means freedom to
do what I like, for in that case I can liberate myself from obstacles
to the fulfillment of desire simply by following the ancient Stoics and
killing desire. But that path, the gradual elimination of the desires
to which obstacles can occur, leads in the end to humans being
gradually deprived of their natural, living activities: in other words,
the most perfectly free human beings will be those who are dead, since
then there is no desire and therefore no obstacles. What I had in mind,
rather, was simply the number of paths down which a man can walk,
whether or not he chooses to do so. That is the first of the two basic
senses of political freedom.
Some have maintained, against me, that freedom must be a triadic
relationship: I can overcome or remove or be free from obstacles only
in order to do something, to be free to perform a given act or acts.
But I do not accept that. Un-freedom in its basic sense is what we
ascribe to the man in jail, or the man tied to a tree; all that such a
man seeks is the breaking of his chains, escape from the cell, without
necessarily aiming at a particular activity once he is liberated. In
the larger sense, of course, freedom means freedom from the rules of a
society or its institutions, from the deployment against one of
excessive moral or physical force, or from whatever shuts off
possibilities of action which otherwise would be open. This I call
"freedom from."
The other central sense of freedom is freedom to: if my negative
freedom is specified by answering the question "How far am I
controlled?" the question for the second sense of freedom is "Who
controls me?" Since we are talking about man-made obstacles, I can ask
myself, "Who determines my actions, my life?" Do I do so, freely,
in whatever way I choose? Or am I under orders from some other source
of control? Is my activity determined by parents, schoolmasters,
priests, policemen? Am I under the discipline of a legal system, the
capitalist order, a slave-owner, the government (monarchical,
oligarchic, democratic)? In what sense am I master of my fate? My
possibilities of action may be limited, but how are they limited? Who
are those who stand in my way, how much power can they wield?
These are the two central senses of "liberty" which I set myself to
investigate. I realized that they differed, that they were answers to
two different questions; but, although cognate, they did not in my view
clash- the answer to one did not necessarily determine the answer to
the other. Both freedoms were ultimate human ends, both were
necessarily limited, and both concepts could be perverted in the course
of human history. Negative liberty could be interpreted as economic
laissez faire, whereby in the name of
freedom owners are allowed to destroy the lives of children in mines,
or factory owners to destroy the health and character of workers in
industry. But that was a perversion, not what the concept basically
means to human beings, in my view. Equally it was said that it is a
mockery to inform a poor man that he is perfectly free to occupy a room
in an expensive hotel, although he may not be able to pay for it. But
that, too, is a confusion. He is indeed free to rent a room there, but
has not the means of using this freedom. He has not the means, perhaps,
because he has been prevented from earning more than he does by a
man-made economic system- but that is a deprivation of freedom to earn
money, not of freedom to rent the room. This may sound a pedantic
distinction, but it is central to discussions of economic versus
political freedom.
The notion of positive freedom has led, historically, to even more
frightful perversions. Who orders my life? I do. I? Ignorant, confused,
driven hither and thither by uncontrolled passions and drives- is that
all there is to me? Is there not within me a higher, more rational,
freer self, able to understand and dominate passions, ignorance, and
other defects, which I can attain to only by a process of education or
understanding, a process which can be managed only by those who are
wiser than myself, who make me aware of my true, "real," deepest self,
of what I am at my best? This is a well-known metaphysical view,
according to which I can be truly free and self-controlled only if I am
truly rational- a belief which goes back to Plato -and since I am not
perhaps sufficiently rational myself, I must obey those who are indeed
rational, and who therefore know what is best not only for themselves
but also for me, and who can guide me along lines which will ultimately
awaken my true rational self and put it in charge, where it truly
belongs. I may feel hemmed in- indeed, crushed- by these authorities,
but that is an illusion: when I have grown up and have attained to a
fully mature, "real" self, I shall understand that I would have done
for myself what has been done for me if I had been as wise, when I was
in an inferior condition, as they are now.
In short, they are acting on my behalf, in the interests of my higher
self, in controlling my lower self; so that true liberty for the lower
self consists in total obedience to them, the wise, those who know the
truth, the elite of sages; or perhaps my obedience must be to those who
understand how human destiny is made- for if Marx is right, then it is
a Party (which alone grasps the demands of the rational goals of
history) which must shape and guide me, whichever way my poor empirical
self may wish to go; and the Party itself must be guided by its
far-seeing leaders, and in the end by the greatest and wisest leader of
all.
There is no despot in the world who cannot use this method of argument
for the vilest oppression, in the name of an ideal self which he is
seeking to bring to fruition by his own, perhaps somewhat brutal and prima facie morally odious means (prima facie
only for the lower empirical self). The "engineer of human souls," to
use Stalin's phrase,8 knows best; he does what he does not simply in
order to do his best for his nation, but in the name of the nation
itself, in the name of what the nation would be doing itself if only it
had attained to this level of historical understanding. That is the
great perversion which the positive notion of liberty has been liable
to: whether the tyranny issues from a Marxist leader, a king, a fascist
dictator, the masters of an authoritarian Church or class or State, it
seeks for the imprisoned, "real" self within men, and "liberates" it,
so that this self can attain to the level of those who give the orders.
This goes back to the naive notion that there is only one true answer
to every question: if I know the true answer and you do not, and you
disagree with me, it is because you are ignorant; if you knew the
truth, you would necessarily believe what I believe; if you seek to
disobey me, this can be so only because you are wrong, because the
truth has not been revealed to you as it has been to me. This justifies
some of the most frightful forms of oppression and enslavement in human
history, and it is truly the most dangerous, and, in our century in
particular, the most violent, interpretation of the notion of positive
liberty.
This notion of two kinds of liberty and their distortions then formed
the center of much discussion and dispute in Western and other
universities, and does so to this day.
Determinism
My other lecture on freedom was entitled "Historical Inevitability."9
Here I stated that determinism was a doctrine very widely accepted
among philosophers for many hundreds of years. Determinism declares
that every event has a cause, from which it unavoidably follows. This
is the foundation of the natural sciences: the laws of nature and all
their applications-the entire body of natural science-rest upon the
notion of an eternal order which the science investigate. But if the
rest of nature is subject to these laws, can it be that man alone is
not? When a man supposes, as most ordinary people do (though not most
scientists and philosophers), that when he rises from the chair he need
not have done so, that he did so because he chose to do so, but he need
not have chosen-when he supposes this, he is told that this is an
illusion, that even though the necessary work by psychologists has not
yet been accomplished, one day it will be (or at any rate in principle
can be), and then he will know that what he is and does is necessarily
as it is, and could not be otherwise. I believe this doctrine to be
false, but I do not in this essay seek to demonstrate this, or to
refute determinism-indeed, I am not sure if such a demonstration or
refutation is possible. My only concern is to ask myself two questions.
Why do philosophers and others think that human beings are fully
determined? And, if they are, is this compatible with normal moral
sentiments and behavior, as commonly understood?
My thesis is that there are two main reasons for supporting the
doctrine of human determinism. The first is that, since the natural
sciences are perhaps the greatest success story in the whole history of
mankind, it seems absurd to suppose that man alone is not subject to
the natural laws discovered by the scientists. (That, indeed, is what
the eighteenth-century philosophes maintained.) The question is not, of
course, whether man is wholly free of such laws-no one but a madman
could maintain that man does not depend on his biological or
psychological structure or environment, or on the laws of nature. The
only question is: Is his liberty totally exhausted thereby? Is there
not some corner in which he can act as he chooses, and not be
determined to choose by antecedent causes? This may be a tiny corner of
the realm of nature, but unless it is there, his consciousness of being
free, which is undoubtedly all but universal-the fact that most people
believe that, while some of their actions are mechanical, some obey
their free will-is an enormous illusion, from the beginnings of
mankind, ever since Adam ate the apple, although told not to do so, and
did not reply, "I could not help it, I did not do it freely, Eve forced
me to do it."
The second reason for belief in determinism is that it does devolve the
responsibility for a great many things that people do on to impersonal
causes, and therefore leaves them in a sense unblameworthy for what
they do. When I make a mistake, or commit a wrong or a crime, or do
anything else which I recognize, or which others recognize, as bad or
unfortunate, I can say, "How could I avoid it?-that was the way I was
brought up" or "That is my nature, something for which natural laws are
responsible" or "I belong to a society, a class, a Church, a nation, in
which everyone does it, and nobody seems to condemn it" or "I am
psychologically conditioned by the way in which my parents behaved to
each other and to me, and by the economic and social circumstances in
which I was placed, or was forced into, not to be able to choose to act
otherwise" or, finally, "I was under orders."
Against this, most people believe that everyone has at least two
choices that he can make, two possibilities that he can realize. When
Eichmann says, "I killed Jews because I was ordered to; if I had not
done it I would have been killed myself," one can say, "I see that it
is improbable that you would have chosen to be killed, but in principle
you could have done it if you had decided to do it-there was no literal
compulsion, as there is in nature, that caused you to act as you did."
You may say it is unreasonable to expect people to behave like that
when facing great dangers: so it is, but however unlikely it may be
that they should decide to do so, in the literal sense of the word they
could have chosen to do so. Martyrdom cannot be expected, but can be
accepted, against whatever odds indeed, that is why it is so greatly
admired.
So much for the reasons for which men choose to embrace determinism in
history. But if they do, there is a difficult logical consequence, to
say the least. It means that we cannot say to anyone, "Did you have to
do that? Why need you have done that?"-the assumption behind which is
that he could have refrained, or done something else. The whole of our
common morality, in which we speak of obligation and duty, right and
wrong, moral praise and blame-the way in which people are praised or
condemned, rewarded or punished, for behaving in a way in which they
were not forced to behave, when they could have behaved otherwise-this
network of beliefs and practices, on which all current morality seems
to me to depend, presupposes the notion of responsibility, and
responsibility entails the ability to choose between black and white,
right and wrong, pleasure and duty; as well as, in a wider sense,
between forms of life, forms of government, and the whole
constellations of moral values in terms of which most people, however
much they may or may not be aware of it, do in fact live.
If determinism were accepted, our vocabulary would have to be very,
very radically changed. I do not say that this is impossible in
principle, but it goes further than what most people are prepared to
face. At best, aesthetics would have to replace morality. You can
admire or praise people for being handsome, or generous, or musical-but
that is not a matter of their choice, that is "how they are made."
Moral praise would have to take the same form: if I praise you for
saving my life at your own risk, I mean that it is wonderful that you
are so made that you could not avoid doing this, and I am glad that I
encountered someone literally determined to save my life, as opposed to
someone else who was determined to look the other way. Honorable or
dishonorable conduct, pleasure-seeking and heroic martyrdom, courage
and cowardice, deceitfulness and truthfulness, doing right against
temptation-these would become like being good-looking or ugly, tall or
short, old or young, black or white, born of English or Italian
parents: something that we cannot alter, for everything is determined.
We can hope that things will go as we should like, but we cannot do
anything toward this-we are so made that we cannot help but act in a
particular fashion. Indeed, the very notion of an act denotes choice;
but if choice is itself determined, what is the difference between
action and mere behavior?
It seems to me paradoxical that some political movements demand
sacrifices and yet are determinist in belief. Marxism, for example,
which is founded on historical determinismthe inevitable stages through
which society must pass before it reaches perfection-enjoins painful
and dangerous acts, coercion and killing, equally painful at times both
to the perpetrators and to the victims; but if history will inevitably
bring about the perfect society, why should one sacrifice one's life
for a process which will, without one's help, reach its proper, happy
destination? Yet there is a curious human feeling that if the stars in
their courses are fighting for you, so that your cause will triumph,
then you should sacrifice yourself in order to shorten the process, to
bring the birthpangs of the new order nearer, as Marx said. But can so
many people be truly persuaded to face these dangers, just to shorten a
process which will end in happiness whatever they may do or fail to do?
This has always puzzled me, and puzzled others.
All this I discussed in the lecture in question, which has remained
controversial, and has been much discussed and disputed, and is so
still.
The Pursuit of the Ideal
There is one further topic which I have written about, and that is the
very notion of a perfect society, the solution to all our ills. Some of
the eighteenth century French philosophes thought the ideal society
they hoped for would inevitably come; others were more pessimistic and
supposed that human defects would fail to bring it about. Some thought
that progress toward it was inexorable, others that only great human
effort could achieve it, but might not do so. However this may be, the
very notion of the ideal society presupposes the conception of a
perfect world in which all the great values in the light of which men
have lived for so long can be realized together, at least in principle.
Quite apart from the fact that the idea had seemed Utopian to those who
thought that such a world could not be achieved because of material or
psychological obstacles, or the incurable ignorance, weakness, or lack
of rationality of men, there is a far more formidable objection to the
very notion itself.
I do not know who else may have thought this, but it occurred to me
that some ultimate values are compatible with each other and some are
not. Liberty, in whichever sense, is an eternal human ideal, whether
individual or social. So is equality. But perfect liberty (as it must
be in the perfect world) is not compatible with perfect equality. If
man is free to do anything he chooses, then the strong will crush the
weak, the wolves will eat the sheep, and this puts an end to equality.
If perfect equality is to be attained, then men must be prevented from
outdistancing each other, whether in material or in intellectual or in
spiritual achievement, otherwise inequalities will result. The
anarchist Bakunin, who believed in equality above all, thought that
universities should be abolished because they bred learned men who
behaved as if they were superior to the unlearned, and this propped up
social inequalities. Similarly, a world of perfect justice-and who can
deny that this is one of the noblest of human values?-is not compatible
with perfect mercy. I need not labor this point: either the law takes
its toll, or men forgive, but the two values cannot both be
realized.
Again, knowledge and happiness may or may not be compatible.
Rationalist thinkers have supposed that knowledge always liberates,
that it saves men from being victims of forces they cannot understand;
to some degree this is no doubt true, but if I know that I have cancer
I am not thereby made happier, or freer-I must choose between always
knowing as much as I can and accepting that there are situations where
ignorance may be bliss. Nothing is more attractive than spontaneous
creativity, natural vitality, a free flowering of ideas, works of
art-but these are not often compatible with a capacity for careful and
effective planning, without which no even moderately secure society can
be created.
Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and
knowledge, mercy and justice-all these are ultimate human values,
sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they
cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses
accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. But if, as I
believe, this is not merely empirically but conceptually true that is,
derives from the very conception of these values-then the very idea of
the perfect world in which all good things are realized is
incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent. And if this is
so, and I cannot see how it could be otherwise, then the very notion of
the ideal world, for which no sacrifice can be too great, vanishes from
view.
To go back to the Encyclopedists and the Marxists and all the other
movements the purpose of which is the perfect life: it seems as if the
doctrine that all kinds of monstrous cruelties must be permitted,
because without these the ideal state of affairs cannot be attained-all
the justifications of broken eggs for the sake of the ultimate
omelette, all the brutalities, sacrifices, brainwashing, all those
revolutions, everything that has made this century perhaps the most
appalling of any since the days of old, at any rate in the West-all
this is for nothing, for the perfect universe is not merely
unattainable but inconceivable, and everything done to bring it about
is founded on an enormous intellectual fallacy.
[Footnote]
*Once when the Berlins' flat in Petrograd was searched the maid successfully hid the few family jewels
in the snow on the balcony.
[Footnote]
1 See the author's Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (Viking, 1979).
[Footnote]
2 Fourier, an early socialist, and SaintSimon believed in a scientifically organized society. For
Saint-Simon it was to be headed by bankers and scientists, and inspired by artists and poets. Their
successors were the French socialists, such as Cabet, Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, and the terrorist Blanqui,
and, in the end, Marx and Engels and their followers.
[Footnote]
3"What is believed everywhere, always, by everyone." Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium 2. 3. 4
Herders Sammtliche Werke, edited by Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877-1913), Vol. 5, p. 509.
[Footnote]
5 See A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 19541966), Vol. 6, pp. 33 and
335.
[Footnote]
6`The Romantics viewed their notion of self-moving centers of historical activity, thrusting forward on
their own terms, as ultimately subjective. These were arbitrary entities-whether Byronic, somewhat
satanic figures at war with society, or heroes who mold around themselves groups of followers
(robbers, in the case of Schiller's play) or entire nations (Lycurgus, Mosesnation-builders so much
admired by Machiavelli-to whom there are certainly modern parallels)-creating in accordance with freely
invented patterns. This view was sternly opposed by such thinkers as Hegel and Marx, who taught,
each in his own fashion, that progress must conform to the iron laws of historical developmentwhether
material development, as in Marx, or spiritual, as in Hegel. Only thus can the emancipation of human
powers from irrational drives be achieved, and a reign be ushered in of total justice, freedom, virtue,
happiness, and harmonious self-realization. This idea of inexorable progress is inherited from the
Judeo-Christian tradition, but without the notions of the inscrutable divine will or the Last Judgment of
mankind-the separation of the satisfactory sheep from the unsatisfactory goats-conducted after death.
[Footnote]
7 Delivered in 1958, and available in two collections of essays by the author: Four Essays on Liberty
(Oxford University Press, 1969) and The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1998).
[Footnote]
8 Stalin used the phrase "engineers of human souls" in a speech on the role of Soviet writers made at
Maxim Gorky's house on October 26, 1932, recorded in an unpublished manuscript in the Gorky
archive-K. L. Zelinsky, "Vstrecha pisatelei s I. V. Stalinym" ("A meeting of writers with I. V. Stalin")-and
published for the first time, in English, in A. KempWelch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia,
1928--39 (Macmillan [UK], 1991), pp. 128-131: for this phrase see p. 131 (and, for the Russian
original, "inzhenery chelovecheskikh dum," I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow, 19461967), Vol.13, p.
410).-H.H. 9 Delivered in 1953, and also included both in Four Essays on Liberty and in The Proper
Study of Mankind.
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