Perhaps you have never read Isaiah Berlin?
Subject:
In Memory of Isaiah Berlin
Date:
Friday, 15 May 1998 5:00. p.m. EST
From:
hwatson@mail.portup.com (Hunter H. Watson)
Organization:
Committee for the Rehabilitation of Socialism
To:
hwatson@portup.com
Newsgroups:
Posted previously on Alt.Politics.
Socialism.Trotsky
Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher and historian, in childhood a
refugee from the
Bolshevik regime, passed away last November. The New York Review of Books
(5-14-98) has published his first and last essays. The first written at
age 12 was a meditation on the 1918 assassination of Moisei S. Uritsky,
chairman of the Petrograd Cheka. The last which summed up his intellectual
path for the benefit of the Chinese was written in 1996. The final essay
is a luminous critique of the 18th Century roots of Western utopianism and
an examination of the fundamental paradox of Marxism. Though the
reproduction here of the paragraphs below cannot do justice to the essay
as a whole they reflect his conclusions:
"While thus engaged in teaching and discussing the kind of philosophy I
have outlined, I was commissioned to write a biography of Karl Marx.
Marx's philosophical views never appeared to me to be particularly
original or interesting, but my study of his views led me to investigate
his predecessors, in particular the French philosophes of the eighteenth
century -- the first organized adversaries of dogmatism, traditionalism,
religion, superstition, ignorance, oppression. I acquired an admiration
for the great task which the thinkers of the Encyclopedie had set
themselves, and for the great work which they did to liberate men from
darkness -- clerical, metaphysical, political, and the like. And although
I came in due course to oppose some of the bases of their common beliefs,
I have never lost my admiration for and sense of solidarity with the
Enlightenement of that period: what I came to be critical of, apart from
its empirical shortcomings, is some of its consequences, both logical
and social; I realized that Marx's dogmatism, and that of his followers,
in part derived from the certainties of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment........
"There is one further topic which I have written about , and that is the
very notion of a perfect society, the solution to all our ills. Some of
the eighteenth-century French philosophes thought the ideal society they
hoped for would inevitably come; others were more pessimistic and supposed
that human defects would fail to bring to bring it about. Some thought
that progress toward it was inexorable, others that only great human
effort could achieve it, but might not do so. However this may be, the
very notion of the ideal society presupposes the conception of a perfect
world in which all the great values in light of which men have lived for
so long can be realized together, at least in principle. Quite apart from
the fact that the idea had seemed Utopian to those who thought that such a
world could not be achieved because of material or psychological
obstacles, or the incurable ignorance, weakness, or lack of rationality of
men, there is a far more formidable objection to the very notion itself.
I do not know who else may have thought this, but it occurred to me that
some ultimate values are compatible with each other and some are not.
Liberty, in whichever sense, is an eternal human ideal, whether individual
or social. So is equality. But perfect liberty (as it must be in the
perfect world) is not compatible with perfect equality. If man is free to
do anything he chooses, then the strong will crush the weak, the wolves
will eat the sheep, and this puts an end to equality. If perfect equality
is to be attained, then men must be prevented from outdistancing each
other, whether in material or in intellectual or in spiritual achievement,
otherwise inequalities will result . The anarchist Bakunin, who believed
in equality above all, thought that universities should be abolished
because they bred learned men who behaved as if they were superior to the
unlearned, and this propped up social inequalities. Similarly, a world of
perfect justice -- and who can deny that this is one of the noblest of
human values? -- is not compatible with perfect mercy. I need not labor
this point: either the law takes its toll, or men forgive, but the two
values cannot both be realized........
Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge,
mercy and justice -- all these are ultimate himan values, sought for
themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be
attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the
pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. But if, as I believe, this is not
merely empirically but conceptually true -- that is, derives from the very
conception of these values -- then the very idea of the perfect world in
which all good things are realized is incomprehensible, as in fact
conceptually incoherent. And if this is so, and I cannot see how it could
be otherwise, then the very notion off the ideal world, for which no
sacrifice can be too great, vanishes from view.
To go back to the Encyclopedists and the Marxists and all the other
movements the purpose of which is the perfect life: it seems as if the
doctrine that all kinds of monstrous cruelties must be permitted, because
without these the ideal state of affairs cannot be attained -- all the
justifications of broken eggs for the sake of the ultimate omelette, all
the brutalities, sacrifices, brainwashing, all those revolutions,
everything that has made this century perhaps the most appalling of any
since the days of old, at any rate in the West -- all this is for nothing,
for the perfect universe is not merely unattainable but inconceivable, and
everything done to bring it about is founded on an enormous intellectual
fallacy."
A far more formidible objection....
Not merely unattainable but inconceivable....... |
