O historiador Mark Lilla (NYU) escreveu uma nova introdução à famosa coleção de ensaios de Isaiah Berlin "Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas". Lilla procura entender, por meio da obra de Berlin, qual o papel da história para a teoria política.
Isiah Berlin: Against the Current
by Mark Lilla
To one who
thinks philosophically, no story is a matter of indifference, even if it were
the natural history of the apes.
—H. M. G. Koster
It was an
anecdote he liked to tell. In 1944, while working at the British Embassy in
Washington, D.C., Isaiah Berlin was called back to London on short notice, and
it happened that the only plane available to take him was a loud, uncomfortable
military bomber. Because the cabin wasn’t pressurized he had to wear an oxygen
mask that kept him from speaking. And there were no lights, either, so he
couldn’t read. It was a long flight. He joked afterward, “one was therefore
reduced to a most terrible thing—to having to think.”
While
airborne, the story went, he had a small epiphany. In the 1930s he had taught
philosophy at Oxford, happily, with his likeminded friends Stuart Hampshire,
J.L. Austin, and A.J. Ayer. Logical positivism had just come into its own in
Britain and Wittgenstein was already developing ideas about language that would
challenge it. Something seemed to be happening. But as the war dragged on Berlin
wondered whether this style of philosophy was really for him. History had
intruded into his life a second time (the first was when he witnessed the
Russian Revolution as a young boy in Petrogad) and he had just spent several
years in the United States writing influential reports to the British
government about the American war effort.
What did
his early writings on verification and logical translation have to do with any
of this? How did they address the pressing issues of the day? He found himself more
and more drawn to engaged nineteenth-century Russian writers like Ivan Turgenev
and Alexander Herzen, whose questions, he was discovering, were closer to his
own. Thinking all this through in the darkness of the bomber he reached the
conclusion, as he later put it, “that what I really wanted was to know more at
the end of my life than I knew at the beginning.” When the war was over he gave
up his philosophy fellowship and started calling himself a historian of ideas.
It was a
witty, self-deprecating story. I’ve often wished, though, that he hadn’t told
it. Berlin’s decision baffled his friends and colleagues back at Oxford, and
left the impression, reinforced by this story, that he had taken a step down
the intellectual ladder. It occurred to no one at the time that moving to the
history of ideas might actually represent a step up. Philosophy was philosophy,
history was history, and that was that. No one in Britain called himself a
historian of ideas, and no one wrote the kind of wide-ranging, labyrinthine
essays connecting thinkers over many centuries that Berlin perfected. The dons
could make nothing of them and considered him a dilettante. Berlin was too
urbane to defend himself or engage in dull debates about methodology, and bore
their contempt with the irony of a gentleman. (At least in public. In
conversation and letters he gave as good as he got.)
Rereading
Against the Current, his first collection of essays and portraits in the
history of ideas, published over thirty years ago, it’s hard to understand how
so many missed what is obvious on every page: that Isaiah Berlin never
abandoned philosophy. The questions he addressed in the book are questions
philosophers have occupied themselves with for millennia: the extent and limits
of reason, the nature of language, the role of the imagination, the foundation
of morality, the concept of justice, the conflicting claims of citizenship and
community, the meaning of history.
But he
reasoned about them in a manner adapted to his particular interests and
abilities. When analytic philosophers look to past thinkers at all, they try to
extract “arguments” they can express in terms they typically use. Their
assumption is that philosophy can only happen once ideas sprout wings and
escape the body, like the souls in Plato’s Phaedrus. This was not Berlin’s
assumption. His instinct told him that you learn more about an idea as an idea
when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people
found it compelling and were spurred to action by it. Then the real thinking
begins.
Intellectual
portraiture once had an important place in philosophy. Plato’s dialogues, when
read singly, appear to be straightforward investigations into discrete
philosophical questions like “What is love?” or “Can virtue be taught?” But
read together they become the portrait of Socrates, whose lesson was that
philosophy is a way of life, not just a set of arguments or doctrines. The same
can be said of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives or Tacitus’ Annals and Histories,
which explore human psychology and morality through profiles of philosophers
and statesmen and despots. Renaissance and early-modern philosophers relied
heavily on these stories to illustrate their own ideas, or to mask them, as
Machiavelli and his followers did with Tacitus. Montaigne leaned more on
Plutarch, who also provided a model for his own venture in philosophical
biography, the essay “Of Friendship,” which evokes the life and ideas of his
friend Étienne de la Boétie.
Berlin did
something similar in his essays. Though he wrote well-regarded profiles of
exemplary figures like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Marx, he was much more
drawn to marginal thinkers he could make exemplary and use to highlight the
questions that interested him. He had a weakness for underdogs, especially if
he initially found their views uncongenial. It didn’t matter if the writing was
obscure or the reasoning sometimes opaque. Berlin had learned that if you
studied them with philosophical intent, certain second-rate minds grappling
with first-rate problems could teach you more than first-rate minds lost in the
shrubbery. (Another reason, perhaps, that he abandoned analytic philosophy.)
He clearly
enjoyed picking up the crumbling collected works of a half-forgotten thinker,
or one considered beyond the pale, and finding high philosophical drama in
them. His approach was the exact contrary of that taken by today’s intellectual
historians, who seem determined to place thinkers into such narrow social
contexts that the wider significance of their ideas disappears. There’s a
deflationary impulse behind their work that is difficult to fathom. Berlin had
no interest in taking thinkers down a peg. If anything, he could be accused of
exaggerating their importance if he thought doing so helped to vivify an
important philosophical problem.
Anyone who
has tried writing philosophical portraits knows how easy it is to fail. It
requires patience. Rather than pounce on arguments that leap off the page, you
must initially suspend critical judgment and surrender to the author—reculer
pour mieux sauter, as the French phrase goes. Berlin described it as a kind of
“feeling-oneself-into” the mind of someone grappling with a set of ideas, the
same kind of sympathy Herder thought necessary to understand an alien culture.
In Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust offered a musical metaphor to describe how he
used to read as a young man:
As soon as
I read an author, I quickly made out beneath the words a kind of tune that in
each author is different from that of others, and without realizing it I began
to “sing along,” speeding or slowing or interrupting the notes as I read,
marking their measures and returns as one does when singing, and waiting a
certain time, depending on the song’s pace, before finally uttering the end of
a word…. And I think that the boy in me who amused himself this way must be the
same one who has a sensitive and accurate ear for hearing the subtle harmony
that others don’t hear between two impressions or ideas.
Berlin had
this very same gift. He not only heard affinities among seemingly unrelated
arguments in a single work, he picked up common intellectual motifs that
appeared in thinkers writing in very different times and places. Like melodic
phrases that imperceptibly migrate from folk songs to symphonies, where their
musical potential gets released, these motifs reflect problems that thinkers
have tried to articulate, with only partial success. They are clues. And if you
follow them, as Berlin did, you discover where the deeper philosophical
difficulties are.
The rewards
of this kind of inquiry can be seen in Berlin’s influential writings on the
Counter-Enlightenment. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as a
Counter-Enlightenment, no club to join or set of doctrines to profess. It was a
term Berlin used to identify a group of dissident modern thinkers dismayed by
the dominant trends in European thought since the seventeenth century, which
they found mistaken and potentially destructive. Giambattista Vico, writing in
provincial Naples in the early eighteenth century, expressed himself very
differently from Hamann and Herder in Frederick the Great’s Prussia, or Bonald
and Joseph de Maistre in exile after the French Revolution. But their common
conviction that something had gone terribly wrong in philosophy inspired them
to advance related and quite serious challenges to the reigning Enlightenment
outlook. Thanks in part to Berlin, they are being read today by people
interested in philosophical problems of mind, language, science, epistemology,
culture, history, and political authority. But Berlin’s own writings on them
point to deeper issues still.
By reading
widely and sympathetically in their writings, Berlin began to understand that
what was ultimately at stake for them was not language or epistemology, or even
politics in the narrow sense. It was the human good, broadly conceived. What
the Counter-Enlightenment saw in the works of Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and
Locke, Kant and Lessing, Voltaire and the editors of the Encyclopédie, was a
blind act of human self-assertion whose consequences no one had bothered to
calculate (except perhaps Rousseau).
Even if one
were to grant that their works established solid foundations for human
knowledge and scientific advance, much more fundamental questions remained.
What are knowledge and science good for? What role should they play in the
lives of the beings we actually are, not the creatures we imagine ourselves to
be? What do people convinced of having certain knowledge do to themselves and
others? What kind of cost, psychological and social, does the overturning of
settled beliefs entail? Can the skeptic live his skepticism? Can whole
societies—which must unite different sorts of people (including the young and
uneducated) for common purposes, sending some of them off to die—live with
uncertainty about ultimate matters?
Early-modern
philosophers who faced the resistance of religious authority were forced to
think about these questions. Most, figuring that la verité vaut bien une messe,
genuflected publicly while continuing their revolutionary work in private; a
few, like the bold Bacon, laid out the moral and political case for the
advancement of learning with military precision. But as the Enlightenment
gained adherents over subsequent centuries and the wider public saw the
benefits of free inquiry, pressure on the new philosophers and scientists to
address the wider implications of their work eased, leaving those who
challenged them looking like irrational, anti-philosophical reactionaries. By
making the question What can we know? paramount, they suppressed the more
unsettling one, Why and what should we want to know?
Berlin’s
achievement was to have used the history of ideas to recover this latter
question and make it urgent once again. If that doesn’t count as philosophical
activity, it’s hard to know what philosophy counts for. But he did more than
that, as the table of contents in Against the Current shows. The book opens
with his wide-angle survey “The Counter-Enlightenment” and ends with essays on
nationalism and Georges Sorel, the French defender of revolutionary violence.
It is a book that can be profitably read front to back, or back to front.
Either way, it shows that the intellectual issues central to the
Counter-Enlightenment have also been central to modern historical experience,
down to the momentous, horrifying developments that intruded into Berlin’s own
twentieth-century life.
In the
essay on Herzen and his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, we are plunged into a
swirl of revolutionary activity in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and Russia, in
the company of a lucid pessimist committed to socialism but distrustful of
violent fanatics convinced they have discerned the final end of history. We see
what can happen to such people in the essay on Sorel, which traces the
bloody-minded politics of the will from Belle Epoque anarchism to Italian
fascism, then to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and even the Black Panthers.
(It was written in 1971.) Other essays introduce us to Moses Hess and Benjamin
Disraeli, whose very different Jewish lives illustrate the moral and
psychological complexities of reconciling pre-given communal belonging with
universal political ideals. The book ends with a sobering reflection on how
legitimate national feeling, which Berlin sympathized with and thought would
persist, could metastasize into nationalistic ideologies bent on erasing the
identity of others.
Isaiah
Berlin was a liberal, a child of the Enlightenment. But he was also a grown-up.
He knew that the Enlightenment’s overconfidence was misplaced, and that its
adversaries had raised objections, especially about the value of knowledge,
that any serious person must consider. Few liberals are liberal when it comes
to their critics. Berlin was. He let them talk and he listened, even if what
they expressed came out in shouts or laments, or their ultimate views, like
Joseph de Maistre’s, he found utterly hateful. They became “cases” offering
lessons philosophy could learn from, even if their writings looked far removed
from philosophy. This is what Berlin once wrote about J.G. Hamann, whose angry,
brilliant, quasi-mystical writings inspired the German Romantics and modern
philosophical antirationalism:
Hamann
speaks for those who hear the cry of the toad beneath the harrow…. His own cry
came from an outraged sensibility: he spoke as a man of feeling offended by a
passion for a cerebral approach; as a moralist who understood that ethics is
concerned with relations between real persons;…as a German humiliated by an
arrogant and, it seemed to him, spiritually blind West; as a humble member of a
dying social order…. If Hamann had not enunciated, in however peculiar a
fashion, truths too contemptuously ignored by the triumphant rationalist
schools, not only in his own century, but in the great Victorian advance and
its continuation in countries that came relatively late to this feast of
reason, the movement that he initiated would not have had its formidable
consequences on both thought and action, not least in our own terrible
century.*
In a sense,
Berlin’s “cases” in the history of ideas are closer in spirit to the modern
sciences than much of what passes for philosophy today. Scientists are
empiricists. Asked whether a mechanical part will crack under freezing
conditions, their first instinct is to plunge it into an ice bucket and see
what happens. Biography and history are to the philosophically inclined
historian of ideas roughly what laboratories are to scientists (though nothing
in history can be made to repeat itself). One can sit at a seminar table and
try to work out the truth conditions of an assertion and the inferences that
can be reasonably drawn from it. One can also look to the inferences people
actually have drawn from it under different conditions, what they thought it
implied, and what it inspired them to do. This exercise can reveal intriguing
intellectual possibilities that seminar members might overlook.
An example.
As a young man Hamann underwent a religious crisis while living alone in
London, after which he turned violently against the German Aufklärer, including
his old friend Immanuel Kant. But on that trip he also discovered Hume’s
skepticism and become a leading proponent of it in Germany. This seems
surprising. After all, Hume’s arguments about reason’s inability to infer cause
from effect were intended to undermine the claims of religion, and the reality
of miracles in particular. Hamann, though, argued that by denying religion the
support of reason, Hume had also protected it from rational scrutiny, leaving
the field open for faith. He wittily observed, in a letter to Kant, that “the
Attic philosopher, Hume, needs faith if he is to eat an egg and drink a glass
of water.” This idiosyncratic take on modern skepticism revealed a genuine
weakness in it that Kant immediately recognized: it could sanction
irrationalism. The challenge posed by the bitter, obscure Hamann was what put
him on the path to the Critique of Pure Reason.
But in the
history of ideas one mainly studies failure. Which, as scientists know, is far more
fruitful than studying success. Why do philosophers get things wrong? Berlin’s
essays suggest that in the interesting “cases” it has less to do with faulty
reasoning or lack of imagination, than with someone’s make-up as a human being
or the time when he happened to write. Every argument comes with an arguer, and
arguers live in history.
Most
philosophers bristle at statements like this, for the understandable reason
that people take it to imply that truth is “relative” or “constructed”
(whatever that might mean), or that the very idea of truth is a fiction. But
they also bristle at the thought that knowing something about these contingent
facts contributes something important to the philosophical enterprise. Knowing
that Kant was rough on his servant Lampe, they will say, tells us nothing about
whether his deduction of the antinomies of pure reason is valid. Which is true,
but misleading.
Anyone who
immerses himself regularly in the collected works of important thinkers—minor
writings, unpublished manuscripts, letters—knows that they are usually all of a
piece. They seem to be held together by some centripetal psychological force,
even if the author changed his mind about important matters. What is surprising
is how rarely one is surprised. Thirty years ago I met a classicist who had
gone to college with an American philosopher who had recently become famous for
writing a blockbuster announcing that philosophy has no foundations, that it is
just a kind of literature. When I asked him about the author, the classicist
replied, “He’s hated philosophy since he was eighteen.”
I remember
thinking at the time that I had just learned something about the relation
between self-awareness and the quest for truth. In Plato’s dialogues what
distinguishes Socrates’ interlocutors from him is not intelligence, it is
awareness of themselves as questioning creatures. The sophists like to make
beautiful speeches full of specious arguments, without ever reflecting on the
nature of argument and its limitations. Pious old men enjoy talking with
Socrates until he shakes their beliefs, at which point they bow out and head
for the temples. Young men brimming with self-confidence want to make a splash
and gain his approval; when it is withheld they turn vicious. One of the guilty
pleasures of reading Plato comes from recognizing human types who claim to want
truth, when all they really are after is comfort or recognition or domination
or revenge or support for their moral and political prejudices. And the
discomfort experienced in reading about them is that you occasionally run
across yourself. The dialogues force anyone who thinks he cares about
philosophy to take a look in the mirror and ask, et tu?
Nothing in
the training of academic philosophers encourages that kind of self-scrutiny.
But the history of ideas as Isaiah Berlin practiced it offers something close.
Reading him I’ve often had the sensation of being pulled up by the scruff of
the neck, to a point where I finally get some perspective on the narrow range
of questions and answers that are occupying me. I don’t think I’m alone. The
feeling it leaves is a mix of humility and excitement. Humility because you see
how parochial and unoriginal you’ve been, how bound to your time and
inclinations, like so many in the past. Humility because you discover old
writers living in difficult times whose marginal status or unorthodox manner of
expression masked important ideas you can learn from. Humility because you see
the larger currents of thought carrying all of us along unawares, and how rare
it is that anyone swims against them.
But there
is excitement, too, the kind young people get from leaving the provinces for
the metropolis. There is so much more to think and talk about philosophically,
issues of lasting importance rather than trivial puzzles. You feel freer.
Rousseau had it exactly backward: it is in the city that we become autonomous,
not in the countryside. By seeing so many more possibilities and circumstances
(and failures), we learn to put away childish things and become ourselves. In
his essays, covering so many thinkers over so many centuries, Isaiah Berlin
created a kind of intellectual city we can explore and grow wiser in, a place
where we can finally begin thinking for ourselves. Against the Current is an
open invitation to visit that city and join the thinning ranks of the
undeceived.
