The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Akhmatova lived in terrible times, during which, according to Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, she behaved with heroism. She did not in public, nor indeed to me in private, utter a single word against the Soviet regime. But her entire life was what Herzen once described Russian literature as being – one continuous indictment of Russian reality. The worship of her memory in the Soviet Union today, 3 undeclared but widespread, has, so far as I know, no parallel. Her unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself transformed her into a figure (as Belinsky once predicted about Herzen) not merely in Russian literature, but in the Russian history of our time.

  My meetings and conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova; my realisation of the conditions, scarcely describable, under which they lived and worked, and of the treatment to which they were subjected; and the fact that I was allowed to enter into a personal relationship, indeed, friendship, with them both, affected me profoundly and permanently changed my outlook. When I see their names in print, or hear them mentioned, I remember vividly the expressions on their faces, their gestures and their words. When I read their writings I can, to this day, hear the sound of their voices.

  1 Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam agreed to give him four out of five for his behaviour in this case.

  2 Cf. op. cit. (p. 444 above, note 1), vol. 4, p. 306.

  3 This was written in 1980.

  THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE ROMANTIC WILL

  The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World

  I

  THE HISTORY OF ideas is a comparatively new field of knowledge, and still tends to be looked at with some suspicion in a good many academic quarters. Yet it has uncovered interesting facts. Among the most striking is the chronology of some of our most familiar concepts and categories, at any rate in the Western world. We discover with some surprise how recently some of them emerged: how strange some of our apparently most deeply rooted attitudes might have seemed to our ancestors. I do not mean by this ideas based upon specific scientific and technological discoveries and inventions unknown to them, or new hypotheses about the nature of matter, or the history of societies remote from us in time or space, or the evolution of the material universe, or the springs of our own behaviour, and the part played in it by insufficiently examined unconscious and irrational factors. I mean something at once more pervasive and less easily traceable to specific causes: changes in widely accepted, consciously followed, secular values, ideals, goals, at any rate in Western civilisation.

  Thus no one today is surprised by the assumption that variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity – monotony, uniformity are pejorative words – or, to turn to qualities of character, that integrity and sincerity are admirable independently of the truth or validity of the beliefs or principles involved; that warm-hearted idealism is nobler, if less expedient, than cold realism; or tolerance than intolerance, even though these virtues can be taken too far and lead to dangerous consequences; and so on. Yet this has not long been so; for the notion that One is good, Many – diversity – is bad, since the truth is one, and only error is multiple, is far older, and deeply rooted in the Platonic tradition. Even Aristotle, who accepts that human types differ from each other, and that therefore elasticity in social arrangements is called for, accepts this as a fact, without regret but without any sign of approval; and, with very few exceptions, this view seems to prevail in the classical and medieval worlds, and is not seriously questioned until, say, the sixteenth century.

  Again, what Catholic in, let us say, the sixteenth century would say, ‘I abhor the heresies of the reformers, but I am deeply moved by the sincerity and integrity with which they hold and practise and sacrifice themselves for their abominable beliefs’? On the contrary, the deeper the sincerity of such heretics, or unbelievers – Muslims, Jews, atheists – the more dangerous they are, the more likely to lead souls to perdition, the more ruthlessly should they be eliminated, since heresy – false beliefs about the ends of men – is surely a poison more dangerous to the health of society than even hypocrisy or dissimulation, which at least do not openly attack the true doctrine. Only truth matters: to die in a false cause is wicked or pitiable.

  Here, then, there is no common ground between views that prevailed even as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth century and modern liberal attitudes. Who in the ancient world or the Middle Ages even spoke of the virtues of diversity in life or thought? But when a modern thinker like Auguste Comte wondered why, when we do not allow freedom of opinion in mathematics, we should allow it in morals and politics, his very question shocked J. S. Mill and other liberals.1 Yet most of these beliefs, which are part of modern liberal culture (and today under attack from both the right and the left on the part of those who have reverted to an older view) – these beliefs are relatively novel, and draw their plausibility from a deep and radical revolt against the central tradition of Western thought. This revolt, which seems to me to have become articulate in the second third of the eighteenth century, principally in Germany, has shaken the foundations of the old, traditional establishment, and has affected European thought and practice profoundly and unpredictably. It is perhaps the largest shift in European consciousness since the Reformation, to which, by twisting, circuitous paths, its origins can be traced.

  II

  If I may be permitted an almost unpardonable degree of simplification and generalisation, I should like to suggest that the central core of the intellectual tradition in the West has, since Plato (or it may be Pythagoras), rested upon three unquestioned dogmas:

  (a) that to all genuine questions there is one true answer and one only, all others being deviations from the truth and therefore false, and that this applies to questions of conduct and feeling, that is, to practice, as well as to questions of theory or observation – to questions of value no less than to those of fact;

  (b) that the true answers to such questions are in principle knowable;

  (c) that these true answers cannot clash with one another, for one true proposition cannot be incompatible with another; that together these answers must form a harmonious whole: according to some they form a logical system each ingredient of which logically entails and is entailed by all the other elements; according to others the relationship is that of parts to a whole, or, at the very least, of complete compatibility of each element with all the others.

  There has, of course, been wide disagreement about the exact path leading to these, often hidden, truths. Some have believed (and believe) that they are to be found in sacred texts, or through their interpretation by appropriate experts – priesthoods, inspired prophets and seers, the doctrine and tradition of a Church. Some put their faith in other kinds of experts: philosophers, scientists, privileged observers of one kind or another, men who may, perhaps, have undergone a special spiritual training, or alternatively simple men, free from the corruption and sophistication of cities – peasants, children, ‘the people’, beings whose souls are pure. Others, again, have taught that these truths are accessible to all men, provided their minds are not befuddled by wiseacres or deliberate deceivers. As for the means of access to the truth, some have appealed to nature, others to revelation; some to reason, others to faith or intuition, or observation, or deductive and inductive disciplines, hypothesis and experiment; and so on.

  Even the most notorious sceptics accepted some part of this: the Greek sophists distinguished between nature and culture and believed that differences of circumstances, environment, temperament, accounted for the variety of laws and customs. But even they believed that ultimate human ends were much the same everywhere, for all men seek, to satisfy natural wants, desire security, peace, happiness and justice. Nor did Montesquieu or Hume, for all their relativism, deny this; the former’s faith in absolute principles such as freedom and justice and the latter’s faith in nature and custom led them to similar conclusions. Moralists, anthropologists, relativists, utilitarians, Marxists all assumed common experience and common ends
in virtue of which human beings were human – too sharp a deviation from such standards pointed to perversion or mental sickness or madness.

  Again, opinions differed about the conditions in which these truths were discoverable: some thought that men, because of original sin, or innate lack of ability, or natural obstacles, could never know the answers to every question, or perhaps any of them fully; some thought that there had been perfect knowledge before the Fall, or before the Flood or some other disaster that had befallen men – the building of the tower of Babel, or primitive accumulation of capital and the class war that resulted from it, or some other breach in the original harmony; others believed in progress – that the golden age lay not in the past but in the future; still others believed that men were finite, doomed to imperfection and error on this earth, but would know the truth in a life beyond the grave; or else that only the angels could know it; or only God himself. These differences led to deep divisions and destructive wars, since nothing less than the question of eternal salvation was at issue. But what none of the contending parties denied was that these fundamental questions were in principle answerable; and that a life formed according to the true answers would constitute the ideal society, the golden age, inasmuch as the very notion of human imperfection was intelligible only as a falling short of the perfect life. Even if we did not, in our fallen state, know of what it consisted, we knew that if only the fragments of the truth by which we lived could be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle the resultant whole, translated into practice, would constitute the perfect life. This could not be so if the questions turned out to be in principle unanswerable, or if more than one answer to the same question was equally true, or, worse still, if some of the true answers proved to be incompatible with each other, if values clashed and could not, even in principle, be reconciled. But this would entail that the universe was in the end irrational in character – a conclusion which reason, and faith that wished to live in peace with reason, could not but reject.

  All the Utopias known to us are based upon the discoverability and harmony of objectively true ends, true for all men, at all times and in all places. This holds of every ideal city, from Plato’s Republic and his Laws, and Zeno’s anarchist world community, and the City of the Sun of Iambulus, to the Utopias of Thomas More and Campanella, Bacon and Harrington and Fénelon. The communist societies of Mably and Morelly, the State capitalism of Saint-Simon, the Phalanstères of Fourier, the various combinations of anarchism and collectivism of Owen and Godwin, Cabet, William Morris and Chernyshevsky, Bellamy, Hertzka and others (there is no lack of them in the nineteenth century) rest on the three pillars of social optimism in the West of which I have spoken: that the central problems – the massimi problemi – of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole. Man has permanent interests, the character of which the right method can establish. These interests may differ from the goals which men actually seek, or think that they seek, which may be due to spiritual or intellectual blindness or laziness, or the unscrupulous machinations of self-seeking knaves – kings, priests, adventurers, power-seekers of all kinds – who throw dust in the eyes of fools and ultimately their own. Such illusions may also be due to the destructive influence of social arrangements – traditional hierarchies, the division of labour, the capitalist system – or again to impersonal factors, natural forces or the unintended consequences of human nature, which can be resisted and abolished.

  Once men’s true interests can be made clear, the claims which they embody can be satisfied by social arrangements founded on the right moral directions, which make use of technical progress or, alternatively, reject it in order to return to the idyllic simplicity of humanity’s earlier days, a paradise which men have abandoned, or a golden age still to come. Thinkers from Bacon to the present have been inspired by the certainty that there must exist a total solution: that in the fullness of time, whether by the will of God or by human effort, the reign of irrationality, injustice and misery will end; man will be liberated, and will no longer be the plaything of forces beyond his control – savage nature, or the consequences of his own ignorance or folly or vice; that this springtime in human affairs will come once the obstacles, natural and human, are overcome, and then at last men will cease to fight each other, unite their powers, and co-operate to adapt nature to their needs (as the great materialist thinkers from Epicurus to Marx have advocated) or their needs to nature (as the Stoics and modern environmentalists have urged). This is common ground to the many varieties of revolutionary and reformist optimism, from Bacon to Condorcet, from the Communist Manifesto to modern technocrats, Communists, anarchists and seekers after alternative societies.

  It is this great myth – in Sorel’s sense of the word – that came under attack towards the end of the eighteenth century by a movement at first known in Germany as Sturm und Drang, and later as the many varieties of romanticism, nationalism, expressionism, emotivism, voluntarism and the many contemporary forms of irrationalism of both the right and the left familiar to everyone today. The prophets of the nineteenth century predicted many things – domination by international cartels, by collectivist regimes both socialist and capitalist, by military-industrial complexes, by scientific élites, preceded by Krisen, Kriege, Katastrophen, wars and holocausts – but what none of them, so far as I know, predicted was that the last third of the twentieth century would be dominated by a world-wide growth of nationalism, enthronement of the will of individuals or classes, and the rejection of reason and order as being prison-houses of the spirit. How did this begin?

  III

  It is customary to say that in the eighteenth century rational views and respect for coherent intellectual systems were succeeded by sentimentality and introspection and the celebration of feeling, as instanced by the bourgeois English novel, the comédie larmoyante, the addiction to self-revelation and self-pity of Rousseau and his disciples, and his onslaughts on the clever but morally empty or corrupt intellectuals of Paris, with their atheism and calculating utilitarianism, which did not take into account the need for love and free self-expression of the unperverted human heart; and that this discredited the hollow pseudo-classicism of the age and opened the gate to unbridled emotionalism. There is some truth in this, but on the one hand Rousseau, like the objects of his scorn, identified nature and reason, and condemned mere irrational ‘passion’; and, on the other, emotion has never been absent from human relationships and art. The Bible, Homer, the Greek tragedians, Catullus, Virgil, Dante, French classical tragedy are full of profound emotion. It was not the human heart or human nature as such that were ignored or suppressed in the central tradition of European art, but this did not prevent continuous concern with form and structure, an emphasis on rules for which rational justification was sought. In art, as in philosophy and politics, there was for many centuries a conscious appeal to objective standards, of which the most extreme form was the doctrine of eternal prototypes, immutable Platonic or Christian patterns, in terms of which both life and thought, theory and practice, tended to be judged. The aesthetic doctrine of mimesis, which unites the ancient, medieval and Renaissance worlds with the Great Style of the eighteenth century, presupposes that there exist universal principles and eternal patterns to be incorporated or ‘imitated’. The revolt which (at least temporarily) overthrew it was directed not merely against the decayed formalism and pedantry of chilly neo-classicism – it went much further, for it denied the reality of universal truths, the eternal forms which knowledge and creation, learning and art and life must learn to embody if they are to justify their claims to represent the noblest flights of human reason and imagination. The rise of science and empirical methods – what Whitehead once called the ‘revolt of matter’ – only substituted one set of forms for another; it shook faith in the a priori axioms and laws provided by theology or Aristotelian metaphysics, and put in their place laws and rules validated by empirical experience, in
particular by a spectacularly increased capacity to fulfil Bacon’s programme – to predict and control nature, and men as natural beings.

  The ‘revolt of matter’ was not a rebellion against laws and rules as such, nor against old ideals – the reign of reason, of happiness and knowledge. On the contrary, the domination of mathematics and analogies made from it to other provinces of human thought, the faith in salvation by knowledge, were never so strong as they were during the Enlightenment. But by the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth we find violent scorn for rules and forms as such – passionate pleas for the freedom of self-expression of groups, movements, individuals, whithersoever this might carry them. Idealistic students in German universities, affected by the romantic currents of the age, thought nothing of such goals as happiness, security or scientific knowledge, political and economic stability and social peace, and indeed looked upon such things with contempt. For the disciples of the new philosophy suffering was nobler than pleasure, failure was preferable to worldly success, which had about it something squalid and opportunist, and could surely be bought only at the cost of betraying one’s integrity, independence, the inner light, the ideal vision within. They believed that it was the minorities, above all those who suffered for their convictions, that had the truth in them, and not the mindless majorities, that martyrdom was sacred no matter in what cause, that sincerity and authenticity and intensity of feeling, and, above all, defiance – which involved perpetual struggle against convention, against the oppressive forces of Church and State and philistine society, against cynicism and commercialism and indifference – that these were sacred values, even if, and perhaps because, they were bound to fail in the degraded world of masters and slaves; to fight, and if need be die, was brave and right and honourable, whereas to compromise and survive was cowardice and betrayal.