The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  These men were champions not of feeling against reason, but of another faculty of the human spirit, the source of all life and action, of heroism and sacrifice, nobility and idealism both individual and collective – the proud, indomitable, untrammelled human will. If the exercise of it caused suffering, led to conflict, was incompatible with an untroubled, harmonious life, or the achievement of artistic perfection, serene and undisturbed by the dust and din of the battle for the fullness of life; if the revolt of Prometheus against the Olympian gods doomed him to eternal torment, then so much the worse for Olympus, down with the view of perfection which can be purchased only at the price of putting chains on the free, independent will, the unbridled imagination, the wild wind of inspiration which bloweth where it listeth. Independence, defiance by individuals and groups and nations, pursuit of goals not because they are universal but because they are mine, or those of my people, my culture – this was the outlook of a minority even among the German romantics, echoed by still fewer in the rest of Europe: nevertheless, they set their stamp on their time and on ours. No great artist, no national leader in the nineteenth century was wholly free from their influence. Let me return to some of its roots in the years before the French Revolution.

  IV

  No thinker was more opposed to undisciplined enthusiasm, emotional turbulence, Schwärmerei – vague, unfocused fervour and yearning – than Immanuel Kant. A scientific pioneer himself, he set himself to give a rational explanation and justification of the methods of the natural sciences, which he rightly looked upon as the major achievement of the age. Nevertheless, in his moral philosophy he did lift the lid of a Pandora’s box, which released tendencies which he was among the first, with perfect honesty and consistency, to disown and condemn. He maintained, as every German schoolboy used to know, that the moral worth of an act depended on its being freely chosen by the agent; that if a man acted under the influence of causes which he could not and did not control, whether external, such as physical compulsion, or internal, such as instincts or desires or passions, then the act, whatever its consequences, whether they were good or bad, advantageous or harmful to men, had no moral value, for the act had not been freely chosen, but was simply the effect of mechanical causes, an event in nature, no more capable of being judged in ethical terms than the behaviour of an animal or a plant. If the determinism that reigns in nature – on which, indeed, the whole of natural science is based – determines the acts of a human agent, he is not truly an agent, for to act is to be capable of free choice between alternatives; and free will must in that case be an illusion. Kant is certain that freedom of the will is not illusory but real. Hence the immense emphasis that he places on human autonomy – on the capacity for free commitment to rationally chosen ends. The self, Kant tells us, must be ‘raised above natural necessity’, for if men are ruled by the same laws as those which govern the material world ‘freedom cannot be saved’, and without freedom there is no morality.2

  Kant insists over and over again that what distinguishes man is his moral autonomy as against his physical heteronomy – for his body is governed by natural laws, not issuing from his own inner self. No doubt this doctrine owes a great deal to Rousseau, for whom all dignity, all pride rest upon independence. To be manipulated is to be enslaved. A world in which one man depends upon the favour of another is a world of masters and slaves, of bullying and condescension and patronage at one end, and obsequiousness, servility, duplicity and resentment at the other. But whereas Rousseau supposes that only dependence on other men is degrading, for no one resents the laws of nature, only ill will,3 the Germans went further. For Kant, total dependence on non-human nature – heteronomy – was incompatible with choice, freedom, morality. This exhibits a new attitude to nature, or at least the revival of an ancient Christian antagonism to it. The thinkers of the Enlightenment and their predecessors in the Renaissance (save for isolated antinomian mystics) tended to look upon nature as divine harmony, or as a great organic or artistic unity, or as an exquisite mechanism created by the divine watchmaker, or else as uncreated and eternal, but always as a model from which men depart at their cost. The principal need of man is to understand the external world and himself and the place that he occupies in the scheme of things: if he grasps this, he will not seek after goals incompatible with the needs of his nature, goals which he can follow only through some mistaken conception of what he is in himself, or of his relations to other men or the external world. This is equally true of rationalists and empiricists, Christian naturalists and pagans and atheists, both in the Renaissance and after – of Pico and Marsilio Ficino, of Locke and Spinoza, Leibniz and Gassendi. For them God is nature’s God, nature is not, as it is for Augustine or Calvin, in conflict with the spirit, a source of temptation and debasement. This world-view reaches its clearest expression in the writings of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, Helvétius and Holbach, d’Alembert and Condorcet, the friends of nature and the sciences, for whom man is subject to the same kind of causal laws as animals and plants and the inanimate world, physical and biological laws, and in the case of men psychological and economic too, established by observation and experiment, measurement and verification. Such notions as the immortal soul, a personal God, freedom of the will, are for them metaphysical fictions and illusions. But they are not so for Kant.

  The German revolt against France and French materialism has social as well as intellectual roots. Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century, and for more than a century before, even before the devastation of the Thirty Years War, had little share in the great renaissance of the West – her cultural achievement after the Reformation is not comparable to that of the Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Spain and England in the age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, least of all of France, the France of poets, soldiers, statesmen, thinkers, which in the seventeenth century dominated Europe both culturally and politically, with only England and Holland as her rivals. What had the provincial German courts and cities, what had even Imperial Vienna, to offer?

  This sense of relative backwardness, of being an object of patronage or scorn to the French with their overweening sense of national and cultural superiority, created a sense of collective humiliation, later to turn into indignation and hostility, that sprang from wounded pride. The German reaction at first is to imitate French models, then to turn against them. Let the vain but godless French cultivate their ephemeral world, their material gains, their pursuit of glory, luxury, ostentation, the witty trivial chatter of the salons of Paris and the subservient court at Versailles. What is the worth of the philosophy of atheists or smooth, worldly abbés who do not begin to understand the true nature, the real purposes of men, their inner life, man’s deepest concerns – his relation to the soul within him, to his brothers, above all to God – the deep, the agonising questions of man’s being and vocation? Inward-looking German pietists abandoned French and Latin, turned to their native tongue, and spoke with scorn and horror of the glittering generalities of French civilisation, the blasphemous epigrams of Voltaire and his imitators. Still more contemptible were the feeble imitators of French culture, the caricature of French customs and taste in the little German principalities. German men of letters rebelled violently against the social oppression and stifling atmosphere of German society, of the despotic and often stupid and cruel German princes and princelings and their officials, who crushed or degraded the humbly born, particularly the most honest and gifted men among them, in the three hundred courts and governments into which Germany was then divided.

  This surge of indignation formed the heart of the movement that, after the name of a play by one of its members, was called Sturm und Drang. Their plays are filled with cries of despair or savage indignation, titanic explosions of rage or hatred, vast destructive passions, unimaginable crimes which dwarf the scenes of violence even in Elizabethan drama; they celebrate passion, individuality, strength, gen
ius, self-expression at whatever cost, against whatever odds, and usually end in blood and crime, their only form of protest against a grotesque and odious social order. Hence all these violent heroes – the Kraftmenschen, Kraftschreiber, Kraftkerls, Kraftknaben – who march hysterically through the pages of Klinger, Schubart, Leisewitz, Lenz, Heinse, and even the gentle Carl Philipp Moritz; until life began to imitate art, and the Swiss adventurer Christoph Kaufmann, a self-proclaimed follower of Christ and Rousseau, who so impressed Herder, Goethe, Hamann, Wieland, Lavater, swept through the German lands with a band of unkempt followers, denouncing polite culture, and celebrating anarchic freedom, transported by wild and mystical public exaltation of the flesh and the spirit.

  Kant abhorred this kind of disordered imagination, and, still more, emotional exhibitionism and barbarous conduct. Although he too denounced the mechanistic psychology of the French Encyclopaedists as destructive of morality, his notion of the will is that of reason in action. He saves himself from subjectivism, and indeed irrationalism, by insisting that the will is truly free only so far as it wills the dictates of reason, which generate general rules binding on all rational men. It is when the concept of reason becomes obscure (and Kant never succeeded in formulating convincingly what this signified in practice), and only the independent will remains man’s unique possession whereby he is distinguished from nature, that the new doctrine becomes infected by the ‘stürmerisch’ mood. In Kant’s disciple, the dramatist and poet Schiller, the notion of freedom begins to move beyond the bounds of reason. Freedom is the central concept of Schiller’s early works. He speaks of ‘the legislator himself, the God within us’, of ‘high, demonic freedom’, ‘the pure demon within the man’. Man is most sublime when he resists the pressure of nature, when he exhibits ‘moral independence of natural laws in a condition of emotional stress’.4 It is will, not reason – certainly not feeling, which he shares with animals – that raises him above nature, and the very disharmony which may arise between nature and the tragic hero is not entirely to be deplored, for it awakens man’s sense of his independence.

  This is a clean break from Rousseau’s invocations to nature and eternal values, no less than from Burke or Helvétius or Hume, with their sharply differing views. In Schiller’s early plays it is the individual’s resistance to external force, social or natural, that is celebrated. Nothing, perhaps, is more striking than the contrast between the values of the leading champion of the German Aufklärung, Lessing, in the 1760s, and those of Schiller in the early ’80s of the century. Lessing, in his play Minna von Barnhelm, written in 1768, describes a proud Prussian officer, accused of a crime of which he is innocent, who disdains to defend himself and prefers poverty and disgrace to fighting for his rights; he is high-minded, but also headstrong; his pride makes it impossible to stoop to quarrels with his detractors, and it is his mistress Minna who, by a display of skill, tact and good sense, manages to rescue him from his condition and cause him to be rehabilitated. Major Tellheim, because of his absurd sense of honour, is represented as heroic but somewhat ridiculous; it is the worldly wisdom of Minna that saves him and turns what might have been a tragic end into an amiable comedy. But Karl Moor in Schiller’s Robbers is this same Tellheim lifted to a great tragic height: he has been betrayed by his unworthy brother, disinherited by his father, and is determined for his own sake, and that of other victims of injustice, to be avenged upon odious, hypocritical society. He forms a robber band, he pillages and murders, he kills the love he bears his mistress – he must be free to wreak his hatred, to pour destruction on the hateful world which has turned him into a criminal. In the end he gives himself up to the police for punishment, but he is a noble criminal, raised far above the degraded society which has ignored his personality, and Schiller writes a moving epitaph upon his tomb.

  The distance which divides Karl Moor from Lessing’s Tellheim is eighteen years: it was in that period that the revolt known as Sturm und Drang reached its height. In his later works Schiller, like Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, came to terms with the world, and preached political resignation rather than revolt. Yet even in a later phase he returns to the notion of will as sheer defiance of nature and convention. Thus in discussing Corneille’s Médée he tells us that when Medea, to avenge herself on Jason, who had abandoned her, killed her children by him, she is a true tragic heroine because with superhuman will-power she defied the force of circumstance and nature, crushed natural feeling, did not allow herself to become a mere animal, driven hither and thither by unresisted passion, but, in her very crime, exhibited the freedom of a self-directed personality, triumphant over nature, even though this freedom was turned to wholly evil ends. Above all, one must act and not be acted upon; Phaethon, he tells us, drove Apollo’s horses wildly, to his doom, but he drove and was not driven. To surrender one’s freedom is to surrender oneself, to lose one’s humanity.

  Rousseau says this too, yet he is sufficiently a son of the Enlightenment to believe that there are eternal truths graven on the hearts of all men, and it is only a corrupt civilisation that has robbed them of the ability to read them. Schiller too supposes that there was once a unity of thought and will and feeling – that man was once unbroken – then possessions, culture, luxury inflicted the fatal wound. This again is the myth of a paradise from which we are driven by some disastrous breach with nature, a paradise to which the Greeks were closer than we are. Schiller too struggles to reconcile the will, man’s inborn freedom, his vocation to be his own master, with the laws of nature and history; he ends by believing that man’s only salvation is in the realm of art, where he can achieve independence of the causal treadmill where, in Kant’s image, man is a mere ‘turnspit’,5 acted upon by external forces. Exploitation is evil inasmuch as it is the using of men as means to ends that are not their own, but those of the manipulator, the treatment of free beings as if they were things, tools, the deliberate denial of their humanity. Schiller oscillates between singing hymns to nature, which, in his Hellenic childhood, was at one with man, and an ominous sense of her as a destroyer; ‘she treads them in the dust, the significant and the trivial, the noble and the base – she preserves a world of ants, but men, her most glorious creation, she crushes in her giant’s arms … in one frivolous hour’.6

  Nowhere was German amour propre more deeply wounded than in East Prussia, still semi-feudal and deeply traditionalist; nowhere was there deeper resentment of the policy of modernisation which Frederick the Great conducted by importing French officials who treated his simple and backward subjects with impatience and open disdain. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most gifted and sensitive sons of this province, Hamann, Herder, and Kant too, are particularly vehement in opposing the levelling activities of these morally blind imposers of alien methods on a pious, inward-looking culture. Kant and Herder at least admire the scientific achievements of the West: Hamann rejects these too. This is the very spirit in which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, a century later, wrote about the West, and, as often as not, is a response of the humiliated, a form of sour grapes – a sublime form of it, perhaps, but still sour grapes – the pretence that what one cannot achieve oneself is not worth striving for.

  This is the bitter atmosphere in which Herder writes: ‘I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!’7 The sages of Paris reduce both knowledge and life to systems of contrived rules, the pursuit of external goods, for which men prostitute themselves, and sell their inner freedom, their authenticity; men, Germans, should seek to be themselves, instead of imitating – aping – strangers who have no connection with their own real natures and memories and ways of life. A man’s powers of creation can be exercised fully only on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs. Only so can true cultures be generated, each unique, each making its own peculiar contribution to human civilisation, each pursuing its own values in its own way, not to
be submerged in some general cosmopolitan ocean which robs all native cultures of their particular substance and colour, of their national spirit and genius, which can flourish only on its own soil, from its own roots, stretching far back into a common past. Civilisation is a garden made rich and beautiful by the variety of its flowers, delicate plants which great conquering empires – Rome, Vienna, London – trample and crush out of existence.

  This is the beginning of nationalism, and even more of populism. Herder upholds the value of variety and spontaneity, of the different, idiosyncratic paths pursued by peoples, each with its own style, ways of feeling and expression, and denounces the measuring of everything by the same timeless standards – in effect, those of the dominant French culture, which pretends that its values are valid for all time, universal, immutable. One culture is no mere step to another. Greece is not an antechamber to Rome. Shakespeare’s plays are not a rudimentary form of the tragedies of Racine and Voltaire.

  This has revolutionary implications. If each culture expresses its own vision and is entitled to do so, and if the goals and values of different societies and ways of life are not commensurable, then it follows that there is no single set of principles, no universal truth for all men and times and places. The values of one civilisation will be different from, and perhaps incompatible with, the values of another. If free creation, spontaneous development along one’s own native lines, not inhibited or suppressed by the dogmatic pronouncements of an élite of self-appointed arbiters, insensitive to history, is to be accorded supreme value; if authenticity and variety are not to be sacrificed to authority, organisation, centralisation, which inexorably tend to uniformity and the destruction of what men hold dearest – their language, their institutions, their habits, their form of life, all that has made them what they are – then the establishment of one world, organised on universally accepted rational principles – the ideal society – is not acceptable. Kant’s defence of moral freedom and Herder’s plea for the uniqueness of cultures, for all the former’s insistence on rational principles and the latter’s belief that national differences need not lead to collisions, shook – some might say undermined – what I have called the three pillars of the main Western tradition.