The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Undermined this tradition in favour of what? Not of the reign of feeling, but of the assertion of the will – the will to do what is universally right in Kant, but something which cuts even deeper in the case of Herder: the will to live one’s own regional, local life, to develop one’s own eigentümlich values, to sing one’s own songs, to be governed by one’s own laws in one’s own home, not to be assimilated to a form of life that belongs to all and therefore to none. Freedom, Hegel once observed, is Bei-sich-selbst-seyn8 – to be at home, not to be impinged upon by what is not one’s own, by alien obstacles to self-realisation whether on the part of individuals or civilisations. The idea of the earthly paradise, of a golden age for the whole of mankind, of one life which all men live in peace and brotherhood, the Utopian vision of thinkers from Plato to H. G. Wells, is not compatible with this. This denial of monism was to lead, in due course, on the one hand to the conservatism of Burke and Möser; on the other, to romantic self-assertion, nationalism, the worship of heroes and leaders, and in the end to Fascism and brutal irrationalism and the oppression of minorities. But all that was still to come: in the eighteenth century the defence of variety, opposition to universalism, is still cultural, literary, idealistic and humane.

  V

  Fichte drives this still further. Inspired both by Kant and less obviously by Herder, an admirer of the French Revolution, but disillusioned by the Terror, humiliated by the misfortunes of Germany, speaking in defence of ‘reason’ and ‘harmony’ – words used by now in more and more attenuated and elusive senses – Fichte is the true father of romanticism, above all in his celebration of will over calm, discursive thought. A man is made conscious of being what he is – of himself as against others or the external world – not by thought or contemplation, since the purer this is, the more a man’s thought is in its object, the less conscious of itself it will be as a subject; self-awareness springs from encountering resistance. It is the impact on me of what is external to me, and the effort to resist it, that makes me know that I am what I am, aware of my aims, my nature, my essence, as opposed to what is not mine; and since I am not alone in the world, but connected by myriad strands, as Burke has taught us, to other men, it is this impact that makes me understand what my culture, my nation, my language, my historical tradition, my true home, have been and are. I carve out of external nature what I need, I see it in terms of my needs, temperament, questions, aspirations: ‘I do not accept what nature offers because I must,’ Fichte declares, ‘I believe it because I will.’9

  Descartes and Locke are evidently mistaken – the mind is not a wax tablet upon which nature imprints what she pleases, it is not an object, but a perpetual activity which shapes its world to respond to its ethical demands. It is the need to act that generates consciousness of the actual world: ‘We do not act because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act.’10 A change in my notion of what should be will change my world. The world of the poet (this is not Fichte’s language) is different from the world of the banker, the world of the rich is not the world of the poor; the world of the Fascist is not the world of the liberal, the world of those who think and speak in German is not the world of the French. Fichte goes further: values, principles, moral and political goals, are not objectively given, not imposed on the agent by nature or a transcendent God. I am not determined by ends: ends are determined by me.11 Food does not create hunger, it is my hunger that makes it food.12 This is new and revolutionary.

  Fichte’s concept of the self is not wholly clear: it cannot be the empirical self, which is subject to the causal necessitation of the material world, but an eternal, divine spirit outside time and space, of which empirical selves are but transient emanations; at other times Fichte seems to speak of it as a super-personal self in which I am but an element – the Group – a culture, a nation, a Church. These are the beginnings of political anthropomorphism, the transformation of State, nation, progress, history, into super-sensible agents, with whose unbounded will I must identify my own finite desires if I am to understand myself and my significance, and be what, at my best, I could and should be. I can only understand this by action: ‘Man shall be and do something’,13 we must be a ‘quickening source of life’, not an ‘echo’ of it or an ‘annex’ to it.14 The essence of man is freedom, and although there is talk of reason, harmony, the reconciliation of one man’s purpose to that of another in a rationally organised society, yet freedom is a sublime but dangerous gift: ‘Not nature but freedom itself produces the greatest and most terrible disorders of our race; man is the cruellest enemy of man.’15 Freedom is a double-edged weapon; it is because they are free that savages devour each other. Civilised nations are free, free to live in peace, but no less free to fight and make war; culture is not a deterrent of violence but its tool. He advocates peace, but if it is to be a choice between freedom, with its potentiality of violence, or the peace of subjection to the forces of nature, he unequivocally prefers – and indeed thinks it is the essence of man not to be able to avoid preferring – freedom. Creation is of man’s essence; hence the doctrine of the dignity of labour, of which Fichte is virtually the author – labour is the impressing of my creative personality upon the material brought into existence by this very need, it is a means for expressing my inner self. The conquest of nature and the attainment of freedom for nations and cultures is the self-realisation of the will: ‘Sublime and living will! Named by no name, compassed by no thought!’16

  Fichte’s will is dynamic reason, reason in action. Yet it was not reason that seems to have impressed itself upon the imagination of his listeners in the lecture-halls of Jena and Berlin, but dynamism, self-assertion; the sacred vocation of man is to transform himself and his world by his indomitable will. This is something novel and audacious: ends are not, as had been thought for more than two millennia, objective values, discoverable within man or in a transcendent realm by some special faculty. Ends are not discovered at all, but made, not found but created. The Russian writer Alexander Herzen asked later in the nineteenth century: Where is the dance before I have danced it? Where is the picture before I have painted it? Where indeed? Joshua Reynolds thought that it dwelt in some super-sensuous empyrean of eternal Platonic forms which the inspired artist must discern and labour to embody as best he can in the medium in which he works – pigment, or marble, or bronze. But the answer Herzen implies is that before the work of art is created it is nowhere, that creation is creation out of nothing – an aesthetics of pure creation which Fichte applies to the realm of ethics, of all action. Man is not a mere compounder of pre-existent elements; imagination is not memory, it literally generates, as God generated the world. There are no objective rules, only what we make.

  Art is not a mirror held up to nature, the creation of an object according to the rules, say, of harmony or perspective, designed to give pleasure. It is, as Herder taught, a means of communication, of self-expression for the individual spirit. What matters is the quality of this act, its authenticity. Since I, the creator, cannot control the empirical consequences of what I do, they are not part of me, do not form part of my real world. I can control only my own motives, my goals, my attitude to men and things. If another man causes me damage, I may suffer physical pain, but I shall not suffer grief unless I respect him, and that is within my control. Man is the inhabitant of two worlds, said Fichte, one of which, the physical, I can afford to ignore; the other, the spiritual, is in my power.17 That is why worldly failure is unimportant, why worldly goods – riches, security, success, fame – are trivial in contrast with what alone counts, my respect for myself as a free being, my moral principles, my artistic or human goals; to give up the latter for the former is to compromise my honour and independence, my real life, for the sake of something outside it, part of the empirical-causal treadmill, and this is to falsify what I know to be the truth, to prostitute myself, to sell out – for Fichte and those who followed him the ultimate sin.

  From here it is no great distance to the wor
lds of Byron’s gloomy heroes – satanic outcasts, proud, indomitable, sinister – Manfred, Beppo, Conrad, Lara, Cain – who defy society and suffer and destroy. They may, by the standards of the world, be accounted criminal, enemies of mankind, damned souls: but they are free; they have not bowed the knee in the House of Rimmon; they have preserved their integrity at a vast cost in agony and hatred. The Byronism that swept Europe, like the cult of Goethe’s Werther half a century earlier, was a form of protest against real or imaginary suffocation in a mean, venal and hypocritical milieu, given over to greed, corruption and stupidity. Authenticity is all: ‘The great object in life’, Byron once said, ‘is Sensation – to feel that we exist – even though in pain.’18 His heroes are like Fichte’s dramatisation of himself, lonely thinkers: ‘There was in him a vital scorn of all … He stood a stranger in this breathing world.’19 The attack on everything that hems in and cramps, that persuades us that we are part of some great machine from which it is impossible to break out, since it is a mere illusion to believe that we can leave the prison – that is the common note of the romantic revolt. When Blake says ‘A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage’,20 the cage is the Newtonian system. Locke and Newton are devils; ‘Reasoning’ is ‘secret Murder’;21 ‘Art is the Tree of Life … Science is the Tree of Death.’22 ‘The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the fruit of life,’ said Hamann a generation earlier,23 and this is literally echoed by Byron. Freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even committing crimes.

  This note was earlier sounded by Diderot (and perhaps by Milton in his conception of Satan, and in Shakespeare’s Troilus). Diderot conceived of man as the theatre of an unceasing civil war between an inner being, the natural man, struggling to get out of the outer man, the product of civilisation and convention. He drew analogies between the criminal and the genius, solitary and savage beings who break rules and defy conventions and take fearful risks, unlike the hommes d’esprit who scatter their wit elegantly and agreeably, but are tame and lack the sacred fire. Half a century before Byron, Lenz, the most authentic voice of the Sturm und Drang, wrote: ‘Action – action is the soul of the world, not pleasure … Without action all feeling and knowledge is nothing but postponed death.’ And again, ‘God brooded over the void and a world arose’; ‘Clear a space! Destroy! Something will arise! Oh God-like feeling!’24 What matters is the intensity of the creative impulse, the depth of nature from which it springs, the sincerity of one’s beliefs, readiness to live and die for a principle, which counts for more than the validity of the conviction or the principle itself.

  Voltaire and Carlyle both wrote about Muhammad. Voltaire’s play is simply an attack on obscurantism, intolerance, religious fanaticism; when he speaks of Muhammad as a blind and destructive barbarian, he means, as everyone knew, the Roman Church, for him the greatest obstacle to justice, happiness, freedom, reason – universal goals which satisfy the deepest demands of all men at all times. When, a century later, Carlyle deals with the same subject, he cares only about Muhammad’s character, the stuff of which he is made, and not his doctrines or their consequences: he calls him ‘a fiery mass of life cast up from the great bosom of nature herself’, possessed of ‘a deep, great, genuine sincerity’.25 ‘Heart! Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!’ These are Herder’s words.26 The attack on Voltaire and the ‘second-rate’ shallow talk in France was mounted by the Germans in the last third of the eighteenth century. Half a century later the goal of rational happiness, especially in its Benthamite version, is rejected contemptuously by the new, romantic generation in continental Europe, for whom pleasure is but ‘tepid water on the tongue’; the phrase is Hölderlin’s,27 but it could just as well have been uttered by Musset or Lermontov. Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge and even Schiller made their peace with the established order. So, in due course, did Schelling and Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel and Arnim and a good many other radicals. But in their earlier years these men celebrated the power of the will to freedom, to creative self-expression, with fateful consequences for the history and outlook of the years that followed.

  One form of these ideas was the new image of the artist, raised above other men not only by his genius but by his heroic readiness to live and die for the sacred vision within him. It was this same ideal that animated and transformed the concept of nations or classes or minorities in their struggles for freedom at whatever cost. It took a more sinister form in the worship of the leader, the creator of a new social order as a work of art, who moulds men as the composer moulds sounds and the painter colours – men too feeble to rise by their own force of will. An exceptional being, the hero and genius to whom Carlyle and Fichte paid homage, can lift others to a level beyond any which they could have reached by their own efforts, even if this can be achieved only at the cost of the torment or death of multitudes.

  For more than two millennia the view prevailed in Europe that there existed an unalterable structure of reality, and the great men were those who understood it correctly either in their theory or their practice – the wise who knew the truth, or the men of action, rulers and conquerors, who knew how to achieve their goals. In a sense the criterion of greatness was success based on getting the answer right. But in the age of which I speak the hero is no longer the discoverer, or the winner in the race, but the creator, even, or perhaps all the more, if he was destroyed by the flame within him – a secularised image of the saint and martyr, of the life of sacrifice. For in the life of the spirit there were no objective principles or values – they were made so by a resolve of the will which shaped a man’s or a people’s world and its norms; action determined thought, not vice versa. To know is to impose a system, not to register passively, said Fichte; and laws are drawn not from facts, but from our own self. One categorises reality as the will dictates. If the empirical facts prove recalcitrant, one must put them in their place, in the mechanical treadmill of causes and effects, which have no relevance to the life of the spirit – to morality, religion, art, philosophy, the realm of ends, not means.

  For these thinkers ordinary life, the common notion of reality, and in particular the artificial constructions of the natural sciences and practical techniques – economic, political, sociological – no less than that of common sense, are a baseless, utilitarian fabrication, what Georges Sorel later called ‘la petite science’,28 something invented for their own convenience by technologists and ordinary men, not reality itself. For Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for Wackenroder and Tieck and Chamisso, above all for E. T. A. Hoffmann, the tidy regularities of daily life are but a curtain to conceal the terrifying spectacle of true reality, which has no structure, but is a wild whirlpool, a perpetual tourbillon of the creative spirit which no system can capture: life and motion cannot be represented by immobile, lifeless concepts, nor the infinite and unbounded by the finite and the fixed. A finished work of art, a systematic treatise, are attempts to freeze the flowing stream of life; only fragments, intimations, broken glimpses can begin to convey the perpetual movement of reality. The prophet of Sturm und Drang, Hamann, had said that the practical man was a somnambulist, secure and successful because he was blind; if he could see, he would go mad, for nature is a wild dance, and the irregulars of life – outlaws, beggars, vagabonds, the visionary, the sick, the abnormal – are closer to it than French philosophers, officials, scientists, sensible men, pillars of the enlightened bureaucracy: ‘The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the fruit of life.’29 The early German romantic plays and novels are inspired by an attempt to expose the concept of a stable, intelligible structure of reality which calm observers describe, classify, dissect, predict, as a sham and a delusion, a mere curtain of appearances designed to protect those not sensitive or brave enough to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence. The irony of the cosmos plays with us all, wrote Tieck: the visible is about us like tapestries with shimmering colours and patterns. Beyond the tapestries is a region populated by dreams and delirium; none dares lif
t the tapestry and peer beyond the curtain.

  Tieck is the originator of the Novel and the Theatre of the Absurd. In William Lovell everything turns out to be its opposite: the personal turns out to be impersonal; the living is discovered to be the dead; the organic, the mechanical; the real, the artificial; men seek freedom and fall into the blackest slavery. In Tieck’s plays there is a deliberate attempt to confound the imaginary and the real: characters in the play (or in a play within the play) criticise the play, complain about the plot, and about the equipment of the theatre; members of the audience expostulate and demand that the illusion, on which all drama rests, be preserved; they are in turn answered sharply by the play’s characters from the stage, to the bewilderment of the real audience; at times musical keys and dynamic tempi engage in dialogues with each other. In Prince Zerbino, when the Prince despairs of reaching the end of his journey he orders the play to be turned backwards – the events to be replayed in reverse order, to unhappen – the will is free to order what it pleases. In one of Arnim’s plays an old nobleman complains that his legs are growing longer and longer: this is the result of boredom; the old man’s inner state is externalised; moreover, his boredom itself is a symbol of the death-throes of the old Germany. As a perceptive contemporary Russian critic has remarked, this is full-blown expressionism long before its triumph a century later, in the Weimar period.