Remora

"There is a sense in which, if you chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path," wrote Christopher Hitchens in an almost perfect takedown of that reputation a couple of years ago in The London Review. Sadly, the essay is unavailable on the Net, so I am quoting from Ignatieff's refutation in the Guardian. There's a recent demonstration of Berlin's general mediocrity in the New Republic -- a letter to George Kennan, no less, mandarin to mandarin communication, which we acolytes and students tremble in our boots to hear. Words of the mighty, man. Shall I excerpt, reader? Here is an example of country and western music masquerading as philosophy:

"...you say (and I am not quoting) that every man possesses a point of weakness, an Achilles' heel, and by exploiting this a man may be made a hero or a martyr or a rag. Again, if I understand you correctly, you think that Western civilisation has rested upon the principle that, whatever else was permitted or forbidden, the one heinous act which would destroy the world was to do precisely this--the deliberate act of tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing, or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust. The whole of the Kantian morality (and I don't know about Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Muslims and high-minded atheists believe it) lies in this; the mysterious phrase about men being "ends in themselves," to which much lip-service has been paid, with not much attempt to explain it, seems to lie in this: that every human being is assumed to possess the capacity to choose what to do, and what to be, however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie, however hemmed in by circumstances beyond his control; that all human love and respect rests upon the attribution of conscious motives in this sense; that all the categories, the concepts, in terms of which we think about and act towards one another--goodness, badness, integrity and lack of it, the attribution of dignity or honour to others which we must not insult or exploit, the entire cluster of ideas such as honesty, purity of motive, courage, sense of truth, sensibility, compassion, justice; and, on the other side, brutality, falseness, wickedness, ruthlessness, lack of scruple, corruption, lack of feelings, emptiness--all these notions in terms of which we think of others and ourselves, in terms of which conduct is assessed, purposes adopted--all this becomes meaningless unless we think of human beings as capable of pursuing ends for their own sakes by deliberate acts of choice--which alone makes nobility noble and sacrifices sacrifices. "

This sounds better on the jukebox than as an argument. The capacity to choose what to do, followed by the modifying "however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie," has that nice yodeling affect, like the honking of a truck going down the foggy road, leaving a diner. But if you are the coldhearted type (stick a thermometer in Limited Inc's heart and register that 32 degrees fahrenheit, baby), you might wonder what on earth this is supposed to mean. Where are those limits coming from, for one thing? Other choices? and the phrase about all human love and respect -- really? Love seems to me to be, to say the least, a problematic emotion to link to the capacity for choice -- are determinists really bad lovers? in fact, in the vocabulary of love, fate has featured for a long time, at least since the Troubadors, as a figure, an intensifier appropriate to the headiness of the sensual flow. Love obviously has a broader definition than is encompassed by describing Abelard's passion for Heloise - there's love of country, there's love of one's kids, etc. Still, Berlin's phrase has that coercive aura -- not a truth, but whatever it is, don't disagree with it, at the risk of being considered a bastard.

But Berlin gets more lachrymose, and more incoherent, as he goes on. Here he is commenting on Hegel and Marx:

"All this [the praise of our choicemaking volk] may seem an enormous platitude, but, if it is true, this is, of course, what ultimately refutes utilitarianism and what makes Hegel and Marx such monstrous traitors to our civilisation. When, in the famous passage, Ivan Karamazov rejects the worlds upon worlds of happiness which may be bought at the price of the torture to death of one innocent child, what can utilitarians, even the most civilised and humane, say to him? After all, it is in a sense unreasonable to throw away so much human bliss purchased at so small a price as one--only one--innocent victim, done to death however horribly--what after all is one soul against the happiness of so many? Nevertheless, when Ivan says he would rather return the ticket, no reader of Dostoevsky thinks this cold-hearted or mad or irresponsible; and although a long course of Bentham or Hegel might turn one into a supporter of the Grand Inquisitor, qualms remain."

This reading of Hegel is ludicrous, and derives more from Bertrand Russell's caricature of the guy in his History of Philosophy than any coming to grips with the passages re Antigone in the Phenomenology of Mind. And a closer reading of Ivan would rather complicate Berlin's scenario, since Ivan in the end simply holds the ticket, so to speak, chosing not to act when Karamazov pere is murdered. Of course, the father is no innocent, and that for the Berlin type, always transmitting sentimentality into necessity and the law of human nature, makes all the difference. It shouldn't for grown-ups.