The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  In the course of such reflections Berlin was bound to encounter the whole cohort of thinkers who, from the beginning, had rebelled against this entire outlook. It was to the enemies of the Enlightenment that Berlin turned to gain insight into the foundering of a general tendency with whose overall ambitions he was in total sympathy, but some of whose unexamined assumptions he had begun seriously to doubt.

  Among these assumptions is that everything should be studied with objective detachment as mere material which can be exhaustively described, classified or brought under causal laws. For scientific purposes, nothing has an independent life of its own outside the system of laws that govern its behaviour or beyond the classificatory schema into which it falls. The unaccountable, the unpredictable, the undescribable are excluded by a method which is by its very nature deterministic. In the case of physics, for example, which for the Enlightenment was the paradigm of science, things have no purposes – ‘final causes’ – no inner lives or ideals; there are only causal regularities. No doubt Aristotle had been guilty of anthropomorphism when he attributed final causes to everything, including the universe itself; but the tendency of Enlightenment thinkers was to eliminate purposes altogether. This seemed unduly austere, especially when they came to study man and his works.

  More generally, the new scientific world-picture rested upon three cardinal presuppositions common to most systematic Western thought from the time of Plato. These are that the cosmos constitutes a single harmonious whole, whose structure exists independently of any observer; that we can discover what this structure is, and find answers to all our questions, of theory and practice; and that we will then possess a seamless, coherent body of knowledge, in which no proposition can contradict another.

  It is against these monolithic dogmas that so much of Berlin’s work is directed. At times he attacks them directly, at other times he exposes their shortcomings by examining the ideas of some of their most formidable opponents. He separates the human realm, where freedom, choice and self-conscious purposive action are central, from the world of impersonal forces. His first step is to defend a non-deterministic form of human freedom. ‘“From Hope and Fear Set Free”’ represents in this respect a blow struck against one of the central orthodoxies running through the history of Western philosophy.

  The question of free will and determinism has preoccupied Berlin all his life. In this essay he takes issue with the ancient doctrine that any increase in knowledge entails an increase in liberty. In its strongest form this view virtually identifies rationality and freedom. The doctrine of classical self-determinism, that true liberty is rational self-direction, Berlin rejects. I cannot be considered free if nothing, including myself and my own nature, can conceivably be other than it is. In that case the notions of freedom and responsibility become otiose.

  The next step is taken at the level of collective human life when, in ‘Historical Inevitability’, Berlin attacks deterministic theories which see history as obeying unalterable laws. Such views are inspired partly by the success of the natural sciences, partly by the deep-rooted belief in teleology according to which all things, like human beings, pursue purposes; and not least by our perennial desire to abdicate responsibility. Berlin exposes all these positions as dogmatic and unempirical. But he also points to a more general argument against determinism which takes us to the very core of his vision of man.

  Few modern thinkers have been as aware as Berlin of the central categories that constitute our notion of human beings. We have known since Kant that there is a framework of categories by which our conception of the external world is bounded. We see, think and act in terms of these, and while we can be made aware of them, they cannot themselves be objects of a science. The intensely difficult enquiry that reveals such categories can be extended in two directions. It can be pressed deeper into the realm of subjectivity, revealing its basic structures; and it can explore the historical emergence of some of the deepest presuppositions about what we are as human beings. While Berlin’s contribution has lain largely in the latter sphere, what he says about the former is nevertheless of great interest. He is intensely aware of a primordial ‘sense of reality’ prior to all further thought and rational analysis, including predictive science. The pages where he describes this, particularly in ‘Historical Inevitability’ and ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, shine with a luminosity rare in modern philosophy. This primitive sense is the root of our conviction that we are free beings in some absolutely non-deterministic sense. So basic is this conviction that our entire moral vocabulary rests upon it: notions such as responsibility, praise, remorse and desert stand or fall with it. We cannot think it away without thinking away so much of our fundamental sense of our humanity that the attempt proves impossible. To seek to explain this unanalysable ‘categorial’ awareness in scientific terms is like trying to make the base of the mountain balance on its summit: it lies several levels below and beyond the reach of causal concepts.

  There are, then, compelling reasons why humans cannot be studied just as natural objects exhaustively explainable by natural science. In ‘The Concept of Scientific History’ in particular, Berlin shows how history differs from science, and explains why a science of history is conceptually impossible. This essay, together with ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, suggests a programme for the type of history of ideas that Berlin advocates. Human beings interpret themselves in terms of very general models. Some of these are as old as humanity itself, and so virtually universal; others change, sometimes dramatically, through history. The Western tradition in political thought has seen a succession of such models. As they become antiquated, do too little justice to the altering patterns of experience, they are replaced by others. No model can encompass the whole of experience once and for all: each is exclusive and at best casts light on a portion of human life. But unlike superseded scientific theories, these models retain a permanent value, for each opens its own special doors of self-understanding; and it should be a central concern of historians of ideas in each generation to ask questions of these models and to evaluate their relevance to the unique problems of their own day. Berlin has spent his life engaged in this activity, with some remarkable results.

  Virtually all Berlin’s work in the history of ideas revolves around what he sees as the greatest revolution in our basic outlook since the Renaissance: the rebellion against monism. The writer whose work, for Berlin, contains the earliest premonitions of this shift is Machiavelli. He, Berlin tells us, was probably the first to juxtapose starkly two mutually exclusive systems of morality: Christian ethics, which aim at the perfection of the individual life; and those of Republican Rome, which aim at the power and the glory of the body politic. No criteria exist for choosing between these two equally valid systems. It is this, and not Machiavelli’s ‘Machiavellianism’, that has exercised us ever since. It marks the first irreparable fracture in the belief in a single universal structure of values.

  Further cracks were opened up by the strange, isolated genius Giambattista Vico. On Berlin’s interpretation, Vico was the first to state explicitly that humans do not possess an unalterable essence; that they understand their own works and the world of history which they themselves make in a way in which they cannot understand the world of external nature; that there is a distinction between the knowledge we acquire as agents, from inside, and that which we acquire by observation, from outside; that a culture has a pervasive pattern by which all its products are marked; that all human institutions and creations are forms of self-expression; that permanent standards in art or life are not available and that everything human should be judged in terms of the canons of its own time and place; and that a new variety of knowledge must be added to the two traditional types (deductive and empirical) – a form of knowledge whereby we enter into the mental universe of other ages and peoples by recreative imagination.

  The implications for Berlin’s own conception of cultural history are apparent: the works of Vico gave birth to the
cardinal distinction between the sciences and the humanities. The fatal consequence for monism is that if an unbridgeable gap exists between these two provinces, then a breach has been blown in the dogma that all knowledge must form a seamless whole.

  It is in the German world that Berlin sees the revolt against the central Enlightenment dogmas as really taking hold. The Sturm und Drang movement railed against all forms of political organisation; and in every sphere of life rejected rules as such. It was the great counter-rationalist J. G. Hamann who first did this consciously. He was against all abstraction. Scientific generalisations had at best an instrumental value: they could not yield unassailable knowledge. True knowledge is given to us only by the senses, and by spontaneous imagination and insight. Everything worth knowing is known by direct perception. Hamann’s theory of language, according to which it does not map a pre-existent timeless reality but creates its own world, with the implication that there are as many worlds as languages, has a very modern ring; and had an immense impact on his disciple J. G. Herder.

  For Berlin, Herder is of central importance. By uncovering some of the principal categories that have transformed the modern world he made a permanent contribution to human self-understanding. Three novel ideas originate with him: populism, the belief that men can realise themselves fully only as members of an identifiable culture with roots in language, tradition, history; expressionism, the notion that men’s works ‘are above all voices speaking’, forms of communication conveying a total vision of life; and pluralism, the recognition of an indefinite variety of cultures and systems of values, all equally ultimate, and incommensurable with one another, so that the belief in a universally valid path to human fulfilment is rendered incoherent.

  After this nothing was the same. From the early 1800s, particularly in the German lands, a new, powerful image bound its spell on the European imagination. Berlin throws light on this in both ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ and ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’. Successive German writers went to increasing lengths in their rejection of the notion of objectivity as such, leaving Vico and Herder far behind – not only in the realm of ethics and aesthetics, but also with regard to the very existence of the objective world. A revolutionary shift of categories occurs, whereby the will usurps the function of the intellect, and free creation replaces scientific discovery. Though this began in the artistic sphere, and in private relations between people, it soon overflowed into politics and social life, with catastrophic results.

  Here the central figure, for Berlin, is Fichte, whose philosophy of the absolute ego that creates everything ushered in an epoch. The heroic individual imposing his will on nature or society becomes the dominant model. The notion of the creative, assertive self generating its own values and goals comes to inform many, very diverse, artistic and political movements. This is the birthplace of pragmatism, existentialism, subjectivism, relativism. Knowledge is demoted to the status of handmaid to our practical purposes, and the world itself is but the image cast by our life-projects. Heroism and martyrdom, integrity and authenticity are the values around which lives are henceforth organised. Ends are created, not discovered. The truth or falsehood of an ideal is no longer thought important, or even to be a question at all.

  The implications for the idea of nationalism are very great. As a coherent doctrine nationalism first emerges in the pages of Herder, whose arch-enemy was French universalist materialism. Berlin presents Herder’s thought as both a rejection of universal rational rules and a German reaction to the condescending attitude of the dominant French. This natural response of wounded pride on the part of a backward people towards a more advanced one is an early case of an attitude which was to become increasingly prevalent in the nineteenth century, and has become a world-wide syndrome today. For Herder the sense of nationhood is benign: but when the free creative self of the German romantics takes on collective forms, as so easily happens, and becomes identified with a nation, or race, or culture, or some other suprapersonal entity, then fights to the death occur. Each separate entity pursues its own independent goals, which it seeks to realise and impose against all comers. Without universal criteria of adjudication, the war of all against all ensues. This is aggressive nationalism with a vengeance, and from here to Fascism and National Socialism is a short step.

  No one has grasped this great mutation of ideas more fully than Berlin; and no one has entered into the minds and hearts of some of its major figures with greater empathy. When he writes about Joseph de Maistre, one of the great harbingers of Fascism, he sounds at some moments almost like an apologist. And so evident is his admiration for the obscurantist arch-reactionary Hamann that some might suppose that Berlin himself belongs to the same camp. Nevertheless, he has often repeated that he is a staunch supporter of Enlightenment. What then is his own position?

  There are five main ways in which he believes that the underlying assumptions of Western rationalism must be radically modified or abandoned. In the first place, anti-rationalist thinkers have undermined the rationalist faith in a single system of timeless norms. But where the full-blown romantics tended to be subjectivists and relativists, and thereby undermined monism comprehensively, Vico and Herder, each in his own way, subscribed to a form of value pluralism which allowed for the flowering of a vast variety of value systems within a shared human horizon. These systems may conflict with and exclude one another; yet so long as a system is such that we can accept, perhaps only after a great effort of imagination, that it was right for those people in those circumstances – and provided it does not offend against our core sense of what it is to be human – then it must be admitted into the great family of possible moral universes. This is the manifestation at a cultural level of what Berlin has identified as ‘objective pluralism’, to which, albeit in a sophisticated and evolved form, he himself subscribes.

  Secondly, any faith in a single static pattern embracing the whole of mankind is blown to pieces. Pluralism entails that Utopia is not so much unrealisable in practical terms as inconceivable, given the nature of human values. All enterprises based on the search for a perfect society are given the lie by this devastating claim.

  Thirdly, in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, which has set the framework for serious discussion of liberty ever since, Berlin used these insights to develop a doctrine of liberty which is both profound and original. In addition to all the standard liberal arguments for individual liberty, he urges that there is one supreme consideration which confers a unique status on ‘negative’ liberty, the freedom to act without outside interference. In a world where values collide, rational solutions to all political questions are not available. Hence the rule of experts and specialists is in principle impossible, and tragic clashes and agonising choices, far from being a pathological anomaly, are an ineradicable part of the human condition. Each individual must in the end decide for himself. Therefore the maximum freedom from interference consonant with basic social order and justice is most likely to promote human flourishing and avoid frustration and suffering. Hence Berlin’s eloquent plea for negative liberty. Hence, too, his cautionary words against the ‘positive’ liberty of self-mastery which, with the monist claims and collectivist implications that so easily become attached to it, can convert liberty into its opposite – an oppressive tyranny, where everyone is forced into his allotted slot. Totalitarian dictatorships of the left and of the right have made these dangers all too plain in the twentieth century.

  Fourthly, in Berlin’s view Herder and the romantics brought to light a permanent historical category: the notion of ‘belonging’ – especially to a nation. Most liberal internationalists have regarded nations and nationalism as a deformation of humanity and not as integral to it. Following Herder, Berlin, virtually alone among liberal thinkers of any stature, has paid serious attention to this phenomenon. In his view Herder, in propounding the conception of ‘belonging’ which he was the first to make explicit – the deep need of humans for membership of a continuous cultural
and historical community rooted in its own territory – discovered a fundamental and unaltering human requirement. If Berlin is right, then the need to acquire and express one’s identity through such a community is a universal need just as imperious as the need for food or for shelter: deprivation may not prove immediately fatal, but in the long run it will wreak havoc.

  In a world of settled normality, communities would, for Herder, coexist in a state of happy and creative self-absorption, uninvaded by and untroubled by invidious comparisons with their neighbours. But this deep human need has enemies of two main types: the universalising tendencies of science and technology; and disruption of the community by invasion, alien rule or expulsion. Any of these can trigger those pathological convulsions of national self-awareness with which the modern world is too familiar. For good or evil, ancient regional and cultural (and racial and religious) identities are resurfacing on every hand.