Isaiah Berlin _ Note

Notes to Isaiah Berlin

1. Late nineteenth-century German neo-Kantians had regarded philosophy as the ‘scientia

scientiarum’, the science of the sciences. That is, science was concerned with enquiring into, and

establishing, how it is possible to know or understand anything else: its goal was to understand

understanding, to know what knowledge is and how it can be achieved.

2. Berlin remained vague about where these concepts and categories came from, and perhaps only

once made at all explicit what the distinction was between these two types of element in the

structure of our thought. Given his overall outlook, and hints scattered through his writings, it

seems likely that he believed they come mainly from culture, education, ordinary experience and

common social practices, as well as philosophical theories. Some might be 'inbuilt' to the extent

that they are influenced by certain basic needs or tendencies intrinsic to human beings, or (like

Kant's examples of space and time) are required to make sense of the world and human existence

in ways comprehensible to our brains, given the manner in which these are able to function. But

Berlin believed that only a few of the concepts and categories that we use are like this; many are

cultural or theoretical artefacts, subject to deliberate alteration or change in response to

experience. Examples of basic concepts that have been transient include a teleological conception

of nature—that is, the view that everything that exists in the world exists for a purpose, and is

defined by the purpose that it pursues—and a conception of human beings as wholly different from

animals, as opposed to a view that sees them as (particularly well-developed) animals.

As for the difference between concepts and categories, a passage in Historical Inevitability (2002b,

144, note 1) appears to show that categories (Berlin's examples here are 'the three dimensions and

infinite extent of ordinary perceptual space, the irreversibility of temporal processes, the multiplicity

and countability of material objects') are more capacious, unspecific and abstract than concepts.

However, the boundary between the two is left open, and it is unclear at what point it is crossed in

the sequence of increasingly specific and variable examples Berlin gives: colours, shapes,

(gustatory) tastes, 'the uniformities on which the sciences are based', 'the categories of value',

'moral standards', 'rules of etiquette', subjective preferences of taste. Concepts are thus perhaps

related to categories somewhat as species to genus, though Berlin does not put it in exactly these

terms, and the evidence for his view does not point to any precise, or consistent, position.

Isaiah Berlin > Notes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/notes.html

1 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

Berlin did not offer a definitive statement or theory about concepts and categories, not only

because to do so involved doing the sort of philosophical work from which he shrank, but also

because he thought that different concepts and categories differed in their origins, function,

necessity, malleability etc. For him, such concepts and categories were simply facts about the way

we think, which were philosophically significant, but best approached in historical or psychological

terms, rather than as Kantian transcendental ideas (that is, ideas which are wholly prior to

experience, and are necessary conditions for any kind of knowledge).

3. Berlin believed that philosophers make two kinds of contribution to the consideration of

philosophical questions. The first is to reformulate these questions by suggesting a new outlook on

the world that liberates the intellect from the state of intellectual quasi-cramp that has caused the

problem. The second, critical rather than creative, contribution is to provide a violent shock to

dogmatic assumptions about the solutions to philosophical questions, thus creating new problems

and inspiring further thought (1996, 59). For a philosopher to do this required considerable force of

character, and a certain amount of exaggeration and simplification, as well as self-confidence and

persistence. Later in life Berlin described himself as a historian of ideas rather than as a

philosopher, despite the fact that his account of the nature of philosophy emphasised philosophy's

historical dimension. This reflected his (high) standards—which he did not believe himself to

meet—for considering someone a genuine or significant philosopher.

4. The topics that dominated Berlin's early work on philosophy were the doctrines of verification

and phenomenalism, derived from the Vienna Circle by way of A. J. Ayer. In the 1930s Berlin and

his philosophical peers at Oxford were occupied primarily with the philosophy of knowledge: How

do, or can, we know things, and what does it mean when we say we know something? They

argued that these questions were tied up with the use of language, and the evaluation of the

meaning of statements with questions such as ‘How do we know what a statement means, or if it

has any meaning at all?’ Verificationism held that the meaning of a statement was to be found in

the way in which it could be verified; if it couldn't be verified—that is, shown to be true, or proven

false—it had no meaning as a statement of fact, but was merely an expression of personal taste, or

meaningless. Phenomenalism held that all our knowledge comes from our sense impressions: we

can know only sense data, i.e. the deliverances of perceptual experience. Anything not founded on

sensory experience is nonsense.

Berlin regarded these doctrines as beneficial in clearing away confusions and exposing errors. But,

while he believed that the world of human experience is all that we can know, he rejected

verifiability as the only, or the most plausible, criterion for judging beliefs or hypotheses, and


2 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

maintained throughout his life that many statements that could not be directly verified by empirical

observation were nevertheless clearly meaningful. He therefore warned his colleagues that the

principle of verification would lead to untenable consequences, and would, if not abandoned or

considerably revised, breed new fallacies in the place of those it had dispelled. Berlin argued that

there are conceptual truths, such as relationships of degree, similarity or contrast, which are

universal, and which inform our experience, but are not subject to empirical test. These

fundamental properties of qualities and relations are brute facts which we cannot deny or think

without, but which we can also not verify by inspection.

Berlin's approach in these early years was shaped by the emphasis on the analysis of the meaning

of words then being championed by his friend J. L. Austin. As Berlin explained at the time, ‘Words

are examined by philosophers for the purpose of discovering whether, as they are used in

successful communication, they tend to exhibit or obscure some characteristic by which one type of

fact differs from another, or alternatively suggest falsely the existence of distinctions which direct

inspection of experience fails to reveal. This is done because inattention to either tends to lead to

systematic confusion and error, not necessarily in the use of words, which, being conventional and

intended for common practice and not the convenience of philosophers, is rightly not altered by

their criticisms, but in the accurate discrimination and description of irreducible types of experience’

(1937, 100–2).

5. The term derives from the Ionian philosophers, the founders of Western philosophy, such as

Thales, who offered different theories about the composition of the universe; a hallmark of these

theories was the attempt to discover a single substance out of which everything else is composed.

6. The distinction between the human or cultural sciences—history, philosophy, law and the various

social sciences, such as sociology, economics, anthropology etc.—had become a major issue in

nineteenth-century German philosophy. It continued to play an important part in Germany in the

earlier twentieth century, and also became a significant issue in the English-speaking world, due

both to the influence of the Vienna Circle and to the emergence of the social sciences as an

increasingly self-confident and respected field of study. Berlin's work, even though it invoked earlier

figures such as G. B. Vico and J. G. Herder, closely resembled, and was influenced by, attempts by

such thinkers as Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber to explain the nature of the

human sciences.

7. Berlin acknowledged that there were certain human sciences that sought to emulate the aims of

the natural sciences, by trying to discover regularities in human behaviour, and refining them into


3 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

explanatory laws. Berlin was dubious regarding such disciplines—economics, sociology, psychology

among them—but acknowledged that such scientific studies of human behaviour had some value.

He maintained, though, that history remained fundamentally different from the natural sciences in

its aims and techniques. Other human sciences may seek to abstract from a large number of stable

similarities and recurrences in human behaviour across many different cases, in order to construct

useful, applicable ideal models to help better understand such behaviour. But history is different: it

is concerned with exploring and understanding individual cases as individual, that is, unique,

non-recurrent, changing and unstable. It is richer in description and less rigorous in explanation.

Other human sciences necessarily abstract: their descriptive power is extensive rather than

intensive, their descriptions thinner. The subject-matter of history, on the other hand, involves a

thick texture of criss-crossing, constantly changing and melting conscious and unconscious beliefs

and assumptions (1978b, 139). History is an ‘amalgam, a rich brew composed of apparently

disparate ingredients’. In looking for satisfactory and satisfying historical accounts, we look for

‘something full enough and concrete enough to meet our conception of public life [...] seen from as

many points of view and at as many levels as possible, including as many components, factors,

aspects as the widest and deepest knowledge, the greatest analytical power, insight, imagination

can present’. Historical explanation is arrangement of the discovered facts in patterns which satisfy

us because they accord with life—the variety of human experience and activity—as we know it and

can imagine it (1978b, 131–2). The historian seeks to capture the unique pattern and peculiar

characteristics of a particular subject: to paint a portrait, rather than take an X-ray image.

8. Berlin took up the problem of free will and determinism, and the related topic of the role of

individual choice and agency in history, both indirectly, through an examination of Leo Tolstoy's

philosophy of history (originally published 1951, republished with additions as The Hedgehog and

the Fox 1953 and in 2008), and in (Historical Inevitability, 1954; republished in 2002b). These

questions had, however, likely preoccupied him since his work on Marx in the mid-1930s, when he

would have encountered them in the form of Plekhanov's defence of historical determinism.

Plekhanov's work served as a challenge to Berlin's belief in the historical importance of individuals,

and his conception of morality, based as it was on the human capacity for choice.

9. The influence on Berlin of Soviet Communism is obvious here; but while this was the main

inspiration and target for his attack, his critique could also be, and was, applied to Nazism, and

even to the more complacent and inhumane policies of capitalist Western democracies.

10. Apart from one essay on ancient Greek individualism (in 2002b), he devoted scant attention to

the history of the ideas in the ancient world. As for the Middle Ages, while Berlin could admit that


4 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

the period might have been superior to what followed in some respects—greater public order,

intellectual security, social cohesion etc.—he regarded it as by and large an intellectually blank

period, because of the very stability and conservatism of its intellectual life. Berlin's interest in

Renaissance thought was greater, though it yielded only one essay — an original examination of

‘The Originality of Machiavelli’ (1972; republished in Berlin 1979).

11. Berlin's writings on the history of ideas can be classified in several different ways. One is

geographical, yielding as a first category works on Russian intellectual and cultural history,

particularly of the nineteenth century; here belong his several essays on Herzen, his two studies of

Tolstoy, his pieces on Turgenev, Belinsky and Plekhanov, as well as those on Russian populism and

the theme of artistic commitment in Russian thought (most of them included in 2008). The other

geographical category covers the history of ideas in Western Europe, primarily focusing on

Germany, but also encompassing France and Italy (with glances at England and Switzerland). (A

third category may be made of Berlin's several essays on modern, secular Jewish thinkers.) It is

also natural to divide his historical essays into portraits of individuals (in addition to those already

named, Vico, Herder, Hamann, Rousseau, Kant, Maistre, Saint-Simon, Fichte, Hegel, Hess, Marx,

Mill, Sorel, Verdi, Meinecke and others) and examinations of larger epochs, movements and

themes—most notably the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, the romantic movement

and nineteenth-century socialism.

12. Berlin derived this interpretation of the Enlightenment's assumptions and inconsistencies from

Plekhanov's works on the history of materialism.

13. Berlin focused, in his accounts of the Enlightenment, on the radical, materialist, naturalist,

proto-Utilitarian element among the philosophes — Holbach, Helvétius, La Mettrie—and the more

mild-mannered Condorcet, though he acknowledged, and sought to encompass, other figures

—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Kant (the last two seen, however, as forerunners of the

Enlightenment's critics, however unintentionally), and sometimes Rousseau.

14. These included the ultramontane Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre (whom he portrayed

as a precursor of Fascism and the author of a disturbingly compelling, dark and savage vision of

human life as essentially characterised by conflict); the Italian antiquarian and critic of scientism

Giambattista Vico; and pre-romantic German enemies of Enlightenment rationalism and

universalism such as Hamann and Herder.

15. Berlin used the terms ‘values’, ‘ideals’ and ‘goals’ more or less—but not quite—interchangeably.

Values, for Berlin, are ideas about what it is good to be and do—about what sort of life, what sort


5 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

of character, what sort of actions, what state of being it is desirable to aspire to.

16. Most prominent among these other pluralist thinkers have been Stuart Hampshire, Bernard

Williams, Michael Walzer, Thomas Nagel, John Gray, Steven Lukes, John Kekes, Joseph Raz, William

Galston and George Crowder; Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor have at

times advanced positions which in some ways resemble pluralism, but are difficult to categorise in

relation to it.

17. Berlin did not respond to Leo Strauss's direct and powerful attack; he did respond to Arnaldo

Momigliano's criticism, which made the pluralism = relativism accusation through an examination

of Berlin's interpretations of Vico and Herder; and he was anxious to draw a sharp distinction

between relativism and pluralism in his later work. Nevertheless, the charge continues to be made

by critics, and rejected by supporters, of Berlin's pluralism.

18. One of the best-known forms of relativism is cultural relativism—the view that all values

emerge from particular cultures, and are valid within and for those cultures, but not necessarily for

others. Berlin sometimes appears to say this; he also seems sometimes to endorse, and sometimes

to disavow, a major assumption underlying most versions of cultural relativism, namely, a holistic

conception of culture. This regards cultures as unified and wholly separate entities, webs in which

each belief is bound together with every other belief, and within which members cannot

disentangle their beliefs one from another, rejecting some, retaining others, judging each critically

and separately. It remains controversial whether Berlin's view of culture was holistic, and, if so, to

what extent and in what way; but it has been maintained—most notably and persistently by Steven

Lukes—that pluralism can be rescued from the shoals of relativism if the pluralist rejects a holistic

conception of culture, which, Lukes maintains, is fundamentally mistaken (Lukes 1994, 1995, 1998,

2001). Lukes's critique of holism, and his de-coupling of pluralism from holism, are plausible; it

does not however necessarily follow that not accepting holism allows the pluralist to believe

consistently in universal standards or values (conflicting though these may be) transcending all

cultures. The rejection of a holistic view of culture does remove a major obstacle to a belief that

certain values transcend cultural differences, in suggesting that cultures aren't wholly

self-contained, closed-off and non-connecting. However, the occurrence of variety, conflict and

dissent within cultures, and the recurrence of certain beliefs in different cultures, need not, in

themselves, suggest the existence of a universal human nature or universal values underlying

cultural variety.

19. Gray has sometimes presented his critique of liberalism as a critique only of a certain sort of


6 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

liberalism, or strain within the liberal tradition, and has opposed to this another, better, more

pluralistic liberalism (see Gray 2002); at other times, he has presented his critique as a more

wholesale indictment of liberalism as such (see e.g. Gray 1993, 1995, 1998).

Gray's arguments can be summarised in vastly simplified form as three main propositions about

liberalism. The first of these is that liberalism is absolutist and monistic: it is based on assigning an

absolute moral/political priority to liberty as the paramount political value. If values really are

incommensurable, then this is unallowable. The second is that liberalism is one value-system or

way of life among many. If pluralism is conceived of in terms of ways of life, value-systems,

cultures etc., rather than individual values, then the conclusion would be that liberalism is just one

of these many valid but conflicting ways of life, with no claim to privilege. Therefore, liberals living

in liberal societies are free to be liberal and pursue liberal values; but they have no right to impose

their views on others, or regard themselves as superior or their way of doing things as preferable.

Finally, Gray charges that liberalism by its nature has historically been a universalist doctrine—that

is, that it has denied this last proposition, and indeed claimed to be superior to other forms of life,

for all people, everywhere, at all times. Therefore, if pluralism is accepted, and liberals accept

liberalism as just one form of life among many, then one of the central goals of traditional

liberalism must be abandoned.

20. Galston has argued that pluralism and liberalism are compatible if neither is seen as a fully

comprehensive or encompassing doctrine, and has sought to suggest what a politics that is both

truly pluralist and truly liberal would look like. Crowder, in probably the most systematic and careful

discussion of the topic to date, has sought to show that Gray's account of value pluralism

incorporates a number of assumptions and conclusions that make his position closer to relativism

than to a truly objective value pluralism; that genuine value pluralism is wholly consistent with a

belief in a core or minimum of universal human values, as well as non-monistic and

non-quantitative comparison of and choice between values based on practical reason; and that

value-pluralism's recognition of both genuine moral variety and a basic, minimal standard of human

decency support liberalism. Steven Lukes has also contributed much to this debate, as have

commentary by Hans Blokland (1999), Jeffrey Friedman (1997), Amy Gutmann (1999), Ira

Katznelson (1994), Charles Larmore (1994), Pratap B. Mehta (1997), Jonathan Riley (2001 and

2002), Michael Walzer (1995) and Daniel Weinstock (1997); there is also a significant review of the

topic by Albert Dzur (1998), and a collection of essays exploring the political implications of

pluralism (Baghramian and Ingram, 2000). Whether these works—in particular, Galston and

Crowder's volumes—have exhausted the pluralism/liberalism debate remains to be seen.


7 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

21. The insensitive and authoritarian rule of managerial bureaucrats—those whom Stalin, in one of

Berlin's favourite quotations, called ‘engineers of human souls’—particularly worried Berlin

throughout the 1950s, when most of his work on political judgement was written.

22. While Herzen's combination of ironic wit, moral passion and vivacity naturally appealed to

Berlin, it may seem strange that the biddable British academic should have identified himself with

the wayward Russian aristocrat turned wandering revolutionary, or that the very embodiment of

cautious, sceptical and moderate liberalism should have regarded a radical malcontent, the father

of Russian agrarian socialism, as a political guide.

In fact, Herzen was an ambivalent revolutionary, and Berlin, while certainly every inch the liberal,

was a less stolid and more radical thinker than is sometimes recognised. The two men shared a

passion for liberty, a suspicion of authority, an opposition to both injustice and intellectual

complacency. However, what Berlin seized on in Herzen was the latter's opposition to — and

occasional passionate denunciation of— the doctrine of historical inevitability, and the political

ethics to which this attack was joined.

23. The distinction goes back at least to Kant, and it (or something like it) had appeared in the

works of T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Boris Chicherin, and had more recently been used

by Guido de Ruggiero, R. G. Collingwood, John Petrov Plamenatz, and Dorothy Fosdyke, among

others; Berlin himself acknowledged Benjamin Constant as the main influence on his thinking.

Berlin's conception of positive and negative liberty may also owe something to Rousseau's

distinction between the liberty of the man and that of the citizen, and to the more general

distinction among earlier theorists, of whom Rousseau was the most prominent, between natural

and moral liberty.

24. Berlin cites Stoicism's preaching of self-discipline and renunciation as a way of resisting, and

remaining uncorrupted by, overwhelmingly powerful earthly authorities; Rousseau's insistence that

the only just society is one in which people retain their liberty by transmuting it from the individual

self-governance of solitary selves in a state of nature to the collective self-rule of the people by the

people, so that obedience to the civil authority is really obedience to oneself, and thus freedom

rather than subjection; and finally Kant's philosophy of moral autonomy, whereby the individual's

inalienable freedom and dignity lie in the fact that the individual acts in accordance with a

self-given moral law, and is therefore recognised as a freely choice-making being, dependent on no

one and nothing else. Berlin has considerable sympathy for this last, Kantian, outlook, though he

believed that it had inspired profound errors. He acknowledged that the Stoic ideal was admirable,


8 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

but charged that it rested on a misuse of words: to attain independence through a renunciation of

those desires that make one prey to the domination of others might be sublime, and it might be

the best that one can do in certain circumstances; but the fact remains that one is then less free

than one would be otherwise, in that there are constraints, both internal and, ultimately, external,

preventing one from acting with true freedom.

25. It must be noted that the former part of Berlin's argument here is somewhat stronger than the

latter: the conflict of values may mean that the making of choices is an inescapable and even

significant part of life, but this is not, in itself, a reason for embracing the making of choices as

something valuable and central to both dignity and fulfillment. Indeed, if making choices involves

the tragic losses that Berlin claims it sometimes does, one may be inclined to try to escape the

painful and difficult position of having to choose, rather than proudly embracing it.

26. Berlin's Zionism has been the subject of minor controversy. Some critics have complained that

it led him to turn a blind eye to injustice and tacitly approve of Israeli chauvinism. This was not so.

Berlin was a liberal and humane Zionist; he believed in the justice and necessity of a Jewish

homeland, but also opposed violence, nationalist aggression and chauvinism wherever they

appeared. Indeed, his aversion to political radicalism led him to support the moderate, pro-British

Chaim Weizmann against more assertive Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion in the 1940s,

even when it became apparent that Ben-Gurion's strategy was likely to be more effective than

Weizmann's in establishing a Jewish state. Later in life Berlin was a quiet but firm, and at times

privately vehement, critic of the Likud bloc and of Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and a

supporter of the Peace Now movement and a ‘two-state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

(see I. Berlin, 1997, letter to A. Margalit).

27. These included Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Norberto Bobbio, Michael Oakeshott, Karl Popper

and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Copyright © 2013 by

Joshua Cherniss <[email protected]>

Henry Hardy <[email protected]>

Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative.

Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia Free

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th

anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from


9 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

1997 to 2007. Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s

anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to [email protected].

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2014 by The Metaphysics Research Lab,

Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054


10 of 10 9/20/2015 12:08 PM

Isaiah Berlin _ Note

Documents

Transcript of Isaiah Berlin _ Note