The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  So, too, Herder’s contemporary, Justus Möser, the first historical sociologist, who wrote about the old life of his native region of Osnabrück in western Germany, said that every age has its own style, every war has its own particular tone, the affairs of State have a specific colouring, dress and manner have inner connections with religion and the sciences; that Zeitstil and Volksstil are everything; that there is a local reason for this or that institution that is not and cannot be universal.13 Möser maintained that societies and persons could be understood only by means of a total impression, not by isolation of element from element in the manner of analytical chemists; this, he tells us, is what Voltaire had not grasped when he mocked the fact that a law which applied in one German village was contradicted by another in a neighbouring one: it is by such rich variety, founded upon ancient, unbroken tradition, that the tyrannies of uniform systems, such as those of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great, were avoided; it is thus that freedoms were preserved.

  Although the influence was not direct, these are the very tones one hears in the works of Burke and many later romantic, vitalistic, intuitionist and irrationalist writers, both conservative and socialist, who defend the value of organic forms of social life. Burke’s famous onslaught on the principles of the French revolutionaries was founded upon the selfsame appeal to the myriad strands that bind human beings into a historically hallowed whole, contrasted with the utilitarian model of society as a trading-company held together solely by contractual obligations, the world of ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’14 who are blind and deaf to the unanalysable relationships that make a family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, any association of human beings held together by something more than a quest for mutual advantage, or by force, or by anything that is not mutual love, loyalty, common history, emotion and outlook. This emphasis in the last half of the eighteenth century on non-rational factors, whether connected with specific religious beliefs or not, which stresses the value of the individual, the peculiar (das Eigentümliche), the impalpable, and appeals to ancient historical roots and immemorial custom, to the wisdom of simple, sturdy peasants uncorrupted by the sophistries of subtle ‘reasoners’, has strongly conservative and, indeed, reactionary implications. Whether stated by the enthusiastic populist Herder with his acute dislike for political coercion, empires, political authority, and all forms of imposed organisation; or by Möser, moderate Hanoverian conservative; or by Lavater, altogether unconcerned with politics; or by Burke, brought up in a different tradition, respectful towards Church and State and the authority of aristocracies and élites sanctified by history – these doctrines clearly constitute a resistance to attempts at a rational reorganisation of society in the name of universal moral and intellectual ideals.

  At the same time abhorrence of scientific expertise inspired radical protest in the works of William Blake, of the young Schiller, and of populist writers in eastern Europe. Above all, it contributed to literary turbulence in Germany in the second third of the eighteenth century: the plays of such leaders of the Sturm und Drang as Lenz, Klinger, Gerstenberg and Leisewitz are outbursts against every form of organised social or political life. What provoked them may have been the asphyxiating philistinism of the German middle class, or the cruel injustices of the small and stuffy courts of stupid and arbitrary German princelings; but what they attacked with equal violence was the entire tidy ordering of life by the principles of reason and scientific knowledge advocated by the progressive thinkers of France, England and Italy. Lenz regards nature as a wild whirlpool into which a man of feeling and temperament will throw himself if he is to experience the fullness of life; for him, for Schubart and for Leisewitz art and, in particular, literature are passionate forms of self-assertion which look on all acceptance of conventional forms as but ‘postponed death’.15 Nothing is more characteristic of the entire Sturm und Drang movement than Herder’s cry ‘I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!’,16 or ‘Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!’17 French reasoning is pale and ghostly. It is this that inspired Goethe’s reaction in the 1770s to Holbach’s Système de la nature as a repulsive, ‘Cimmerian, corpse-like’18 treatise, which had no relation to the marvellous, inexhaustibly rich vitality of the Gothic cathedral at Strasbourg, in which, under Herder’s guidance, he saw one of the noblest expressions of the German spirit in the Middle Ages, of which the critic of the Augustan age understood nothing. Heinse in his fantasy Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln leads his central characters, after a bloodstained succession of wild experiences of more than ‘Gothic’ intensity, to an island where there is total freedom in personal relations, all rules and conventions have finally been flung to the winds, where man in an anarchist-communist society can at last stretch himself to his full stature as a sublime creative artist. The inspiration of this work is a violent, radical individualism, which represents an early form, not unlike the contemporary erotic fantasies of the marquis de Sade, of a craving for escape from imposed rules and laws whether of scientific reason or of political or ecclesiastical authority, royalist or republican, despotic or democratic.

  By an odd paradox, it is the profoundly rational, exact, unromantic Kant, with his lifelong hatred of all forms of Schwärmerei, who is in part, through exaggeration and distortion of at least one of his doctrines, one of the fathers of this unbridled individualism. Kant’s moral doctrines stressed the fact that determinism was not compatible with morality, since only those who are the true authors of their own acts, which they are free to perform or not perform, can be praised or blamed for what they do. Since responsibility entails power of choice, those who cannot freely choose are morally no more accountable than stocks and stones. Thereby Kant initiated a cult of moral autonomy, according to which only those who act and are not acted upon, whose actions spring from a decision of the moral will to be guided by freely adopted principles, if need be against inclination, and not from the inescapable causal pressure of factors beyond their control – physical, physiological, psychological (such as emotion, desire, habit) – can properly be considered to be free or, indeed, moral agents at all. Kant acknowledged a profound debt to Rousseau, who, particularly in the ‘profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar’ in the fourth book of his Émile, spoke of man as an active being in contrast with the passivity of material nature, a possessor of a will which makes him free to resist the temptations of the senses. ‘I am a slave through my vices and free through my remorse’; it is the active will, made known directly by ‘conscience’, which for Rousseau is ‘stronger than reason [i.e. prudential argument] which fights against it’, that enables man to choose the good; he acts, if need be, ‘against the law of the body’, and so makes himself worthy of happiness.19 But although this doctrine of the will as a capacity not determined by the causal stream is directed against the sensationalist positivism of Helvétius or Condillac, and has an affinity to Kant’s free moral will, it does not leave the objective framework of natural law which governs things as well as persons, and prescribes the same immutable, universal goals to all men.

  This emphasis upon the will at the expense of contemplative thought and perception, which function within the predetermined grooves of the categories of the mind that man cannot escape, enters deeply into the German conception of moral freedom as entailing resistance to nature and not harmonious collusion with her, overcoming of natural inclination, and rising to Promethean resistance to coercion, whether by things or by men. This, in its turn, led to the rejection of the doctrine that to understand is to accept the view that knowledge demonstrates the rational necessity and therefore the value of what, in his irrational state, may have seemed to man mere obstacles in his path. This conception, opposed as it is to reconciliation with reality, in its later, romantic form favoured the ceaseless fight, at times ending in tragic defeat, against the forces of blind nature, which cares nothing for human ideas, and against the accumulated weight of authority and tradition – the vast incubus of the uncriticised past, made concrete
in the oppressive institutions of the present. Thus, when Blake denounces Newton and Locke as the great enemies, it is because he accuses them of seeking to imprison the free human spirit in constricting, intellectual machines; when he says, ‘A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage’,20 the cage is none other than Newtonian physics, which crushes the life out of the free, spontaneous, untrammelled human spirit. ‘Art is the Tree of Life … Science is the Tree of Death’;21 Locke, Newton, the French raisonneurs, the reign of cautious, pragmatic respectability and Pitt’s police were all, for him, parts of the same nightmare. There is something of this, too, in Schiller’s early play Die Räuber (written in 1781), where the violent protest of the tragic hero Karl Moor, which ends in failure, crime and death, cannot be averted by mere knowledge, by a better understanding of human nature or of social conditions or of anything else; knowledge is not enough. The Enlightenment doctrine that we can discover what men truly want, and can provide technical means and rules of conduct for their greatest permanent satisfaction, and that this is what leads to wisdom, virtue, happiness, is not compatible with Karl Moor’s proud and stormy spirit, which rejects the ideas of his milieu, and will not be assuaged by the reformist gradualism and belief in rational organisation advocated by, say, the Aufklärung of the previous generation. ‘Law has degraded to a snail’s pace what would have been an eagle’s flight.’22 Human nature is no longer conceived of as, in principle, capable of being brought into harmony with the natural world: for Schiller some fatal Rous-seauian break between spirit and nature has occurred, a wound has been inflicted on humanity which art seeks to avenge, but knows it cannot fully heal.

  Jacobi, a mystical metaphysician deeply influenced by Hamann, cannot reconcile the demands of the soul and the intellect: ‘The light is in my heart: as soon as I try to carry it to my intellect, it goes out.’23 Spinoza was for him the greatest master since Plato of the rational vision of the universe; but for Jacobi this is death in life: it does not answer the burning question of the soul whose homelessness in the chilly world of the intellect only self-surrender to faith in a transcendent God will remedy.

  Schelling was perhaps the most eloquent of all the philosophers who represented the universe as the self-development of a primal, non-rational force that can be grasped only by the intuitive powers of men of imaginative genius – poets, philosophers, theologians or statesmen. Nature, a living organism, responds to questions put by the man of genius, while the man of genius responds to the questions put by nature, for they conspire with each other; imaginative insight alone, no matter whose – an artist’s, a seer’s, a thinker’s – becomes conscious of the contours of the future, of which the mere calculating intellect and analytic capacity of the natural scientist or the politician, or any other earthbound empiricist, has no conception. This faith in a peculiar, intuitive, spiritual faculty which goes by various names – reason, understanding, primary imagination – but is always differentiated from the critical analytic intellect favoured by the Enlightenment – the contrast between it and the analytic faculty or method that collects, classifies, experiments, takes to pieces, reassembles, defines, deduces, and establishes probabilities – becomes a commonplace used thereafter by Fichte, Hegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe, Carlyle, Schopenhauer and other anti-rationalist thinkers of the nineteenth century, culminating in Bergson and later anti-positivist schools.

  This, too, is the source of that stream in the great river of romanticism which looks upon every human activity as a form of individual self-expression, and on art, and indeed every creative activity, as a stamping of a unique personality, individual or collective, conscious or unconscious, upon the matter or the medium in and upon which it functions, seeking to realise values which are themselves not given but generated by the process of creation itself. Hence the denial, both in theory and in practice, of the central doctrine of the Enlightenment, according to which the rules in conformity with which men should live and act and create are pre-established, dictated by nature herself. For Joshua Reynolds, for example, the ‘great style’ is the realisation of the artist’s vision of eternal forms, prototypes beyond the confusions of ordinary experience, which his genius enables him to discern and which he seeks to reproduce, with all the techniques at his command, on his canvas or in marble or bronze. Such mimesis or copying from ideal patterns is, for those who derive from the German tradition of revolt against French classicism, not true creation. Creation is creation of ends as well as means, of values as well as their embodiments; the vision that I seek to translate into colours or sounds is generated by me, and peculiar to me, unlike anything that has ever been, or will be, above all not something that is common to me and other men seeking to realise a common, shared, universal, because rational, ideal. The notion that a work of art (or any other work of man) is created in accordance with rules dictated by objective nature, and therefore binding for all practitioners of it, as Boileau or the abbé Batteux had taught, is rejected in toto. Rules may be an aid here or there, but the least spark of genius destroys them, and creates its own practice, which uncreative craftsmen may imitate, and so be saying nothing of their own. I create as I do, whether I am an artist, a philosopher, a statesman, not because the goal that I seek to realise is objectively beautiful, or true, or virtuous, or approved by public opinion, or demanded by majorities or tradition, but because it is my own.

  What this creative self may be differs according to doctrine. Some regard it as a transcendent entity to be identified with a cosmic spirit, a divine principle to which finite men aspire as sparks do to the great central flame; others identify it with their own individual, mortal, flesh-and-blood selves, like Byron, or Hugo, or other defiandly romantic writers and painters. Others again identified the creative self with a super-personal ‘organism’ of which they saw themselves as elements or members – nation, or Church, or culture, or class, or history itself, a mighty force of which they conceived their earthly selves as emanations. Aggressive nationalism, self-identification with the interests of the class, the culture or the race, or the forces of progress – with the wave of a future-directed dynamism of history, something that at once explains and justifies acts which might be abhorred or despised if committed from calculation of selfish advantage or some other mundane motive – this family of political and moral conceptions is so many expressions of a doctrine of self-realisation based on defiant rejection of the central theses of the Enlightenment, according to which what is true, or right, or good, or beautiful can be shown to be valid for all men by the correct application of objective methods of discovery and interpretation, open to anyone to use and verify. In its full romantic guise this attitude is an open declaration of war upon the very heart of the rational and experimental method which Descartes and Galileo had inaugurated, and which for all their doubts and qualifications even such sharp deviationists as Montesquieu, or Hume and Rousseau and Kant, fully and firmly accepted. For the truly ardent opponents of classicism, values are not found but made, not discovered but created; they are to be realised because they are mine, or ours, whatever the nature of the true self is pronounced to be by this or that metaphysical doctrine.

  The most extravagant of the German romantics, Novalis or Tieck, looked on the universe not as a structure that can be studied or described by whatever methods are most appropriate, but as a perpetual activity of the spirit and of nature, which is the selfsame spirit in a dormant state; of this constant upward movement the man of genius is the most conscious agent, who thus embodies the forward activity that advances the life of the spirit most significantly. While some, like Schelling and Coleridge, conceive this activity as the gradual growth into self-consciousness of the world spirit that is perpetually moving towards self-perfection, others conceive the cosmic process as having no goal, as a purposeless and meaningless movement, which men, because they cannot face this bleak and despair-inducing truth, seek to hide from themselves by constructing comforting illusions in the form of religions that promise re
wards in another life, or metaphysical systems that claim to provide rational justification both for what there is in the world and for what men do and can do and should do; or scientific systems that perform the task of appearing to give sense to a process that is, in fact, purposeless, a formless flux which is what it is, a brute fact, signifying nothing. This doctrine, elaborated by Schopenhauer, lies at the root of much modern existentialism and of the cultivation of the absurd in art and thought, as well as of the extremes of egoistic anarchism driven to their furthest lengths by Stirner, and by Nietzsche (in some of his moods), Kierkegaard (Hamann’s most brilliant and profound disciple) and modern irrationalists.

  The rejection of the central principles of the Enlightenment – universality, objectivity, rationality, the capacity to provide permanent solutions to all genuine problems of life or thought, and (not less important) the accessibility of rational methods to any thinker armed with adequate powers of observation and logical thinking – occurred in various forms, conservative or liberal, reactionary or revolutionary, depending on which systematic order was being attacked. Those, for example, like Adam Müller or Friedrich Schlegel, and, in some moods, Coleridge or Cobbett, to whom the principles of the French Revolution or the Napoleonic organisation came to seem the most fatal obstacles to free human self-expression, adopted conservative or reactionary forms of irrationalism and at times looked back with nostalgia towards some golden past, such as the pre-scientific ages of faith, and tended (not always continuously or consistently) to support clerical and aristocratic resistance to modernisation and the mechanisation of life by industrialism and the new hierarchies of power and authority. Those who looked upon the traditional forces of authority or hierarchical organisation as the most oppressive of social forces – Byron, for example, or George Sand, or, so far as they can be called romantic, Shelley or Büchner – formed the ‘left wing’ of the romantic revolt. Others despised public life in principle, and occupied themselves with the cultivation of the inner spirit. In all cases the organisation of life by the application of rational or scientific methods, any form of regimentation or conscription of men for utilitarian ends or organised happiness, was regarded as the philistine enemy.