The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Against this kind of interpretation, in terms of the purposes and characters of individuals, there is a cluster of views (to which the progress of the natural sciences has given a great and growing prestige) according to which all explanations in terms of human intentions stem from a mixture of vanity and stubborn ignorance. These views rest on the assumption that belief in the importance of the motives is delusive; that the behaviour of men is in fact made what it is by causes largely beyond the control of individuals; for instance by the influence of physical factors or of environment or of custom; or by the ‘natural’ growth of some larger unit – a race, a nation, a class, a biological species; or (according to some writers) by some entity conceived in even less empirical terms – a ‘spiritual organism’, a religion, a civilisation, a Hegelian (or Buddhist) World Spirit; entities whose careers or manifestations on earth are the object either of empirical or of metaphysical enquiries, depending on the cosmological outlook of particular thinkers.

  Those who incline to this kind of impersonal interpretation of historical change, whether because they believe that it possesses greater scientific value (that is, enables them to predict the future or ‘retrodict’ the past more successfully or precisely), or because they believe that it embodies some crucial insight into the nature of the universe, are committed by it to tracing the ultimate responsibility for what happens to the acts or behaviour of impersonal or ‘transpersonal’ or ‘super-personal’ entities or ‘forces’ whose evolution is identified with human history. It is true that the more cautious and clear-headed among such theorists try to meet the objections of empirically minded critics by adding, in a footnote or as an afterthought, that, whatever their terminology, they are on no account to be taken to believe that there literally exist such creatures as civilisations or races or spirits of nations living side by side with the individuals who compose them; and they add that they fully realise that all institutions ‘in the last analysis’ consist of individual men and women, and are not themselves personalities but only convenient devices – idealised models, or types, or labels, or metaphors – different ways of classifying, grouping, explaining or predicting the properties or behaviour of individual human beings in terms of their more important (that is, historically effective) empirical characteristics. Nevertheless these protestations too often turn out to be mere lip-service to principles which those who profess them do not really believe. Such writers seldom write or think as if they took these deflationary caveats over-seriously; and the more candid or naïve among them do not even pretend to subscribe to them. Thus nations or cultures or civilisations, for Schelling or Hegel (and Spengler; and one is inclined, though somewhat hesitantly, to add Toynbee), are certainly not merely convenient collective terms for individuals possessing certain characteristics in common; but seem more ‘real’ and more ‘concrete’ than the individuals who compose them. Individuals remain ‘abstract’ precisely because they are mere ‘elements’ or ‘aspects’, ‘moments’ artificially abstracted for ad hoc purposes, and literally without reality (or, at any rate, ‘historical’ or ‘philosophical’ or ‘real’ being) apart from the wholes of which they form a part, much as the colour of a thing, or its shape, or its value are ‘elements’ or ‘attributes’ or ‘modes’ or ‘aspects’ of concrete objects – isolated for convenience, and thought of as existing independently, on their own, only because of some weakness or confusion in the analysing intellect.

  Marx and Marxists are more ambiguous. We cannot be quite sure what to make of such a category as a social ‘class’ whose emergence and struggles, victories and defeats, condition the lives of individuals, sometimes against, and most often independently of, such individuals’ conscious or expressed purposes. Classes are never proclaimed to be literally independent entities: they are constituted by individuals in their (mainly economic) interaction. Yet to seek to explain, or put a moral or political value on, the actions of individuals by examining such individuals one by one, even to the limited extent to which such examination is possible, is considered by Marxists to be not merely impracticable and time-wasting (as indeed it may be), but absurd in a more fundamental sense – because the ‘true’ (or ‘deeper’) causes of human behaviour lie not in the specific circumstances of an individual life or in the individual’s thoughts or volitions (as a psychologist or biographer or novelist might describe them), but in a pervasive interrelationship between a vast variety of such lives with their natural and man-made environment. Men do as they do, and think as they think, largely as a ‘function of’ the inevitable evolution of the ‘class’ as a whole – from which it follows that the history and development of classes can be studied independently of the biographies of their component individuals. It is the ‘structure’ and the ‘evolution’ of the class alone that (causally) matters in the end. This is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the belief in the primacy of collective patterns held by those who attribute active properties to race or culture, whether they be benevolent internationalists like Herder who thought that different peoples can and should admire, love and assist one another as individuals can and do, because peoples are in some sense individuals (or super-individuals); or by the ferocious champions of national or racial self-assertion and war, like Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Hitler. And the same note, sometimes mild and civilised, sometimes harshly aggressive, is heard in the voices of all those upholders of collectivist mystiques who appeal from individual to tradition, or to the collective consciousness (or ‘Unconscious’) of a race or a nation or a culture, or, like Carlyle, feel that abstract nouns deserve capital letters, and tell us that Tradition or History (or ‘the past’, or the species, or ‘the masses’) is wiser than we, or that the great society of the quick and the dead, of our ancestors and of generations yet unborn, has larger purposes than any single creature, purposes of which our lives are but a puny fragment, and that we belong to this larger unity with the ‘deepest’ and perhaps least conscious parts of ourselves.7 There are many versions of this belief, with varying proportions of empiricism and mysticism, ‘tender’- and ‘tough’-mindedness, optimism and pessimism, collectivism and individualism; but what all such views have in common is the fundamental distinction on which they rest, between, on the one hand, ‘real’ and ‘objective’, and, on the other, ‘subjective’ or ‘arbitrary’ judgements, based respectively on acceptance or rejection of this ultimately mystical act of self-identification with a reality which transcends empirical experience.

  For Bossuet, for Hegel, for Marx,8 for Spengler (and for almost all thinkers for whom history is ‘more’ than past events, namely a theodicy) this reality takes on the form of an objective ‘march of history’. The process may be thought of as being in time and space or beyond them; as being cyclical or spiral or rectilinear, or as occurring in the form of a peculiar zigzag movement, sometimes called dialectical; as continuous and uniform, or irregular, broken by sudden leaps to ‘new levels’; as due to the changing forms of one single ‘force’, or to conflicting elements locked (as in some ancient myth) in an eternal Pyrrhic struggle; as the history of one deity or ‘force’ or ‘principle’, or of several; as being destined to end well or badly; as holding out to human beings the prospect of eternal beatitude, or eternal damnation, or both in turn, or neither. But whatever version of the story is accepted – and it is never a scientific, that is, empirically testable theory, stated in quantitative terms, still less a description of what our eyes see and our ears hear9 – the moral of it is always one and the same: that we must learn to distinguish the ‘real’ course of things from the dreams and fancies and ‘rationalisations’ which we construct unconsciously for our solace or amusement; for these may comfort us for a while, but will betray us cruelly in the end. There is, we are told, a nature of things, and it has a pattern in time: ‘Things and actions are what they are,’ said a sober English philosopher over two centuries ago, ‘and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?’10
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  What, then, must we do to avoid deception? At the very least – if we cannot swallow the notion of super-personal ‘spirits’ or ‘forces’ – we must admit that all events occur in discoverable, uniform, unaltering patterns; for if some did not, how could we find the laws of such occurrences? And without universal order – a system of true laws – how could history be ‘intelligible’? How could it ‘make sense’, ‘have meaning’, be more than a picaresque account of a succession of random episodes, a mere collection (as Descartes, for this very reason, seems to have thought) of old wives’ tales? Our values – what we think good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptible – all these are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair. We praise and blame, worship and condemn whatever fits or does not fit the interests and needs and ideals that we seek to satisfy – the ends that (being made as we are) we cannot help pursuing – according to our lights, that is, our own perception of our condition, our place in ‘Nature’. Such attitudes are held to be ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ to the degree to which we perceive this condition accurately, that is, understand where we are in terms of the great world plan, the movement whose regularities we discern as well as our historical sense and knowledge permit. To each condition and generation its own perspectives on the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness. To condemn the Greeks or the Romans or the Assyrians or the Aztecs for this or that folly or vice may be not more than to say that what they did or wished or thought conflicts with our own view of life, which may be the true or ‘objective’ view for the stage which we have reached, and which is perceived less or more clearly according to the depth and accuracy of our understanding of what this stage is, and of the manner in which it is developing. If the Romans and the Aztecs judged differently from us, they may have judged no less well and truly and ‘objectively’, to the degree to which they understood their own condition and their own very different stage of development. For us to condemn their scale of values is valid enough for our condition, which is the sole frame of reference we have. And if they had known us they might have condemned us as harshly and, because their circumstances and values were what they inevitably were, with equal validity.

  According to this view there is nothing, no point of rest outside the general movement, where we or they can take up a stand, no static absolute standards in terms of which things and persons can be finally evaluated. Hence the only attitudes correctly described, and rightly condemned, as relative, subjective and irrational are forms of failure to relate our judgement to our own truest interests, that is, to what will fulfil our natures most fully – to all that the next step in our inevitable development necessarily holds in store. Some thinkers of this school view subjective aberrations with compassion and condone them as temporary attitudes from which the enlightenment of the future will henceforward preserve mankind. Others gloat exultantly or ironically over the inevitable doom of those who misinterpret, and therefore fall foul of, the inexorable march of events. But whether the tone is charitable or sardonic, whether one condemns the errors of foolish individuals or the blind mob, or applauds their inevitable annihilation, this attitude rests on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it does by the machinery of history itself – by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, the Life-Force, Progress, the Spirit of the Age. Given this organisation of our lives, which we did not create, and cannot alter, it, and it alone, is ultimately responsible for everything. To blame or praise individuals or groups of individuals for acting rightly or wrongly, so far as this entails a suggestion that they are in some sense genuinely free to choose between alternatives, and may therefore be justly and reasonably blamed or praised for choosing as they did and do, is a vast blunder, a return to some primitive or naïve conception of human beings as being able somehow to evade total determination of their lives by forces natural or supernatural, a relapse into a childish animism which the study of the relevant scientific or metaphysical system should swiftly dispel. For if such choices were real, the determined world structure which alone, on this view, makes complete explanation, whether scientific or metaphysical, possible could not exist. And this is ruled out as unthinkable, ‘reason rejects it’, it is confused, delusive, superficial, a piece of puerile megalomania, pre-scientific, unworthy of civilised men.

  The notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or supernatural, that every event of human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins: infatuation with the natural sciences feeds this stream, but is not its sole or, indeed, its principal source. In the first place there is the teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men, and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed by a creator but are, as it were, internal to their possessors, so that every entity has a ‘nature’ and pursues a specific goal which is ‘natural’ to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils it. Evil, vice, imperfection, all the various forms of chaos and error, are, on this view, forms of frustration, impeded efforts to reach such goals, failures due either to misfortune, which puts obstacles in the path of self-fulfilment, or to misdirected attempts to fulfil some goal not ‘natural’ to the entity in question.

  In this cosmology the world of men (and, in some versions, the entire universe) is a single all-inclusive hierarchy; so that to explain why each ingredient of it is as, and where, and when it is, and does what it does, is eo ipso to say what its goal is, how far it successfully fulfils it, and what are the relations of co-ordination and subordination between the goals of the various goal-pursuing entities in the harmonious pyramid which they collectively form. If this is a true picture of reality, then historical explanation, like every other form of explanation, must consist, above all, in the attribution to individuals, groups, nations, species of their proper place in the universal pattern. To know the ‘cosmic’ place of a thing or a person is to say what it is and does, and at the same time why it should be and do as it is and does. Hence to be and to have value, to exist and to have a function (and to fulfil it less or more successfully) are one and the same. The pattern, and it alone, brings into being, and causes to pass away, and confers purpose, that is to say, value and meaning, on all there is. To understand is to perceive patterns. To offer historical explanations is not merely to describe a succession of events, but to make it intelligible; to make intelligible is to reveal the basic pattern – not one of several possible patterns, but the one unique plan which, by being as it is, fulfils only one particular purpose, and consequently is revealed as fitting in a specifiable fashion within the single ‘cosmic’ overall schema which is the goal of the universe, the goal in virtue of which alone it is a universe at all, and not a chaos of unrelated bits and pieces. The more thoroughly the nature of this purpose is understood, and with it the pattern it entails in the various forms of human activity, the more explanatory or illuminating – the ‘deeper’ – the activity of the historian will be. Unless an event, or the character of an individual, or the activity of this or that institution or group or historical personage, is explained as a necessary consequence of its place in the pattern (and the larger, that is, the more comprehensive the schema, the more likely it is to be the true one), no explanation – and therefore no historical account – is being provided. The more inevitable an event or an action or a character can be exhibited as being, the better it has been understood, the profounder the researcher’s insight, the nearer we are to the one embracing, ultimate truth.

  This attitude is profoundly anti-empirical. We attribu
te purposes to all things and persons not because we have evidence for this hypothesis; for if there were a question of evidence for it, there could in principle be evidence against it; and then some things and events might turn out to have no purpose and therefore, in the sense used above, be incapable of being fitted into the pattern, that is, of being explained at all; but this cannot be, and is rejected in advance, a priori. We are plainly dealing not with an empirical theory but with a metaphysical attitude which takes for granted that to explain a thing – to describe it as it ‘truly’ is, even to define it more than verbally, that is, superficially – is to discover its purpose. Everything is in principle explicable, for everything has a purpose, although our minds may be too feeble or too distraught to discover in any given case what this purpose is. On such a view to say of things or persons that they exist is to say that they pursue goals; to say that they exist or are real, yet literally lack a purpose, whether imposed from outside or ‘inherent’ or ‘innate’, is to say something not false, but literally self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Teleology is not a theory, or a hypothesis, but a category or a framework in terms of which everything is, or should be, conceived and described.