For Berlin, negative liberty means not being interfered with by others. Berlin, though, is not a proponent of enlarging the sphere of freedom indefinitely. The boundaries are a matter for deliberation, for, as he says, quoting R. For another, it is clear that in order to provide the widest sphere of freedom to the widest number of people, there must be restraints on the freedom of some, or, in some areas, of all.
For Berlin, the nature of negative freedom is such that no particular regime is necessary to ensure it. As he puts it:. To avoid glaring inequality or widespread misery I am ready to sacrifice some, or all, of my freedom: I may do so willingly and freely; but it is freedom that I am giving up for the sake of justice or equality or the love of my fellow men. I should be guilt-stricken, and rightly so, if I were not, in some circumstances, to make this sacrifice. But a sacrifice is not an increase in what is being sacrificed, namely freedom, however great the moral need or the compensation for it.
Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. It is the desire, familiar to Classical Greece and Republican Rome, that individuals should be able to govern themselves, or, at least, be directly involved in establishing the rules under which they are to live.
This is the case in part because positive freedom presupposes, for Berlin, a conception of the self different from that presupposed by negative liberty. For example, highly religious societies and similar forms of society all have in common the idea that in order to be free, individuals must adhere to a rule. There is a higher freedom that represents the truth. Members of those societies who do not recognize this truth must be compelled to do so. Isaiah Berlin was a lecturer at various colleges at Oxford after and was a visiting professor at scores of American colleges—most notably Harvard, Princeton, and The City College of New York.
He was president of the British Academy from to and a member of the board of governors of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was knighted in and received The Order of Merit in Berlin married Aline Elizabeth Yvonne de Gunzburg in As a young man Berlin became an avid Zionist. He felt that Zionism was the natural liberation movement of the Jewish people, who after two millennia in exile had a right to their own homeland.
Berlin's family was integral to the establishment of the Hasidic dynasty of Lubavitch during the Napoleonic Wars. Aline Berlin's family was also prestigious in the Russian Jewish community, where as the Barons De Ginsbourg, served as grand bankers in Russia and Paris and as renowned philanthropists. He viewed the Jewish community as an extended family and for Berlin, a "strong family feeling was one of the primary colors of human emotion.
Berlin was first and foremost a historian of ideas. At the heart of his philosophy of history is the conviction that the tools of science are the servants of historians rather than their masters.
This means that science by itself cannot provide us with predictive explanations that account for social transformation. Natural selection may be able to explain the transformations among species but it cannot explain the more complex changes that take place within the interplay of ideas and political traditions. Furthermore, while the methods of science are indispensable for historical explanation, the historian cannot discover laws of historical development in the sense that the physicist can discover the laws of planetary motion.
The historian must appeal to larger explanatory concepts than are to be found within a mechanistic science. Two such concepts that often appear in Berlin's picture of history are the interrelated concepts of monism and pluralism. Monism represents the tendency on the part of human beings to see unity amidst diversity. More important, it involves a tendency to subordinate individual values to larger social values. Monism is, in many respects, utopian.
Monists tend to picture humans as striving toward one ultimate end and individuals as servants of larger historical processes. For example, within psychology a monistic thinker would tend to see all behavior as deriving from a common source or a common principle.
Sigmund Freud conceived of all human behavior as deriving from the fundamental desire of individuals to secure their own private pleasure; all human energy is libidinal and all human action is to be understood as the working out of this libidinal energy. Why is Shakespeare a great writer? The Freudian answer is monistic in the sense that Shakespeare's art was his way of sublimating sexual or libidinal energy.
Another kind of monistic thinker was Karl Marx, the 19th-century philosopher and economist whose ideas spawned 20th-century communism. Marx believed that all social behavior had a common root, namely, economics. For Marx, if one wished to explain any social or historical phenomenon, one merely had to discover economic factors that caused the phenomenon.
Berlin saw the school or schools of thought that began to emerge shortly before the French Revolution, and became ascendant during and after it, as profoundly antagonistic towards the Enlightenment.
Berlin has been viewed both as an adherent of the Enlightenment who showed a fascination, whether eccentric or admirable, with its critics; and as a critic and even opponent of the Enlightenment, who frankly admired its enemies. But he also believed that they were wrong, and sometimes dangerously so, about some of the most important questions of society, morality and politics.
He regarded their psychological and historical vision as shallow, excessively uniform, and naive; and he traced to the Enlightenment a technocratic, managerial view of human beings and political problems to which he was profoundly opposed, and which, in the late s and early s, he regarded as one of the gravest dangers facing the world. He attacked or dismissed their metaphysical beliefs, particularly the philosophies of history of Hegel and his successors.
He was also wary of the aesthetic approach to politics that many Romantics had practised and fostered. Romanticism rebelled in particular against the constricting order imposed by reason, and championed the human will. Berlin was sympathetic to this stance, but also believed that the Romantics had gone too far both in their protests and in their celebrations.
Berlin did not set out a systematic theory about the nature of values, and so his view must be gleaned from his writings on the history of ideas. His remarks on the status and origins of values are ambiguous, though not necessarily irreconcilable with one another.
Rather, they are human creations, and derive their authority from this fact. From this followed a theory of ethics according to which individual human beings are the most morally valuable things, so that the worth of ideals and actions should be judged in relation to the meanings and impact they have for and on such individuals. At other times Berlin seems to advance what amounts almost to a theory of natural law, albeit in minimalist, empirical dress.
In such cases he suggests that there are certain unvarying features of human beings, as they have been constituted throughout recorded history, that make certain values important, or even necessary, to them. Values, then, would be beliefs about what it is good to be and do — about what sort of life, what sort of character, what sort of actions, what state of being it is desirable, given human nature, for us to aspire to.
In an attempt to reconcile these two strands, one might say that, for Berlin, the values that humans create are rooted in the nature of the beings who pursue them. But this is simply to move the question back a step, for the question then immediately arises: Is this human nature natural and fixed, or created and altered over time through conscious or unconscious human action?
He rejects the idea of a fixed, fully specified human nature, regarding natural essences with suspicion. Yet he does believe however under-theorised, unsystematic and undogmatic this belief may be in boundaries to, and requirements made by, human nature as we know it. This common human nature may not be fully specifiable in terms of a list of unvarying characteristics; but, while many characteristics may vary from individual to individual or culture to culture, there is a limit on the variation — just as the human face may vary greatly from person to person in many of its properties, while remaining recognisably human, but at the same time it is possible to distinguish between a human and a non-human face, even if the difference between them cannot be reduced to a formula.
There is a related ambiguity about whether values are objective or subjective. Yet it is unclear what exactly he meant by this, or how this belief relates to his view of values as human creations. There are at least two accounts of the objectivity of values that can be plausibly attributed to Berlin. These views are not incompatible with one another, but they are distinct; and the latter provides a firmer basis for the minimal moral universalism that Berlin espoused. Finally, Berlin insisted that each value is binding on human beings by virtue of its own claims, in its own terms, and not in terms of some other value or goal, let alone the same value in all cases.
His definition of monism may be summarised as follows:. We have seen that Berlin denied that the first two of these assumptions are true. In his ethical pluralism he pushed these denials further, and added a forceful denial of the third assumption. They may — and often do — come into conflict with one another. When two or more values clash, it is not because one or another has been misunderstood; nor can it be said, a priori, that any one value is always more important than another.
Liberty can conflict with equality or with public order; mercy with justice; love with impartiality and fairness; social and moral commitment with the disinterested pursuit of truth or beauty the latter two values, contra Keats, may themselves be incompatible ; knowledge with happiness; spontaneity and free-spiritedness with dependability and responsibility.
Berlin further asserted that values may be not only incompatible, but incommensurable. There has been considerable controversy over what he meant by this, and whether his understanding of incommensurability was either correct or coherent. Thus one basic implication of pluralism for ethics is the view that a quantitative approach to ethical questions such as that envisaged by Utilitarianism is impossible. In addition to denying the existence of a common currency for comparison, or a governing principle such as the utility principle , value incommensurability holds that there is no general procedure for resolving value conflicts — there is not, for example, a lexical priority rule that is, no value always has priority over another.
Yet he also held that the doctrine of pluralism reflected logically necessary rather than contingent truths about the nature of human moral life and the values that are its ingredients.
The idea of a perfect whole or ultimate solution is not only unattainable in practice, but also conceptually incoherent. To avert or overcome conflicts between values once and for all would require the transformation, which amounted to the abandonment, of those values themselves.
It is not clear that this logical point adds anything significant to the empirical point about human ends recorded in the last quotation, but we do not pursue this doubt here. One of these, discussed below, was liberalism. Another was humanism — the view that human beings are of primary importance, and that avoiding harm to human beings is the first moral priority Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet ; Cherniss and Hardy Philosophy itself cannot tell us how to do this, though it can help by bringing to light the problem of moral conflict and all of its implications, and by weeding out false solutions.
Pluralism holds that, in many cases, there is no single right answer. Berlin also made a larger argument about making choices. Pluralism involves conflicts, and thus choices, not only between particular values in individual cases, but between ways of life. While Berlin seems to suggest that individuals have certain inherent traits — an individual nature, or character, which cannot be wholly altered or obscured — he also insisted that they make decisions about who they will be and what they will do.
Choice is thus both an expression of an individual personality, and part of what makes that personality; it is essential to the human self. Berlin provided his own inconsistent and somewhat peculiar genealogies of pluralism. He found the first rebellion against monism either in Machiavelli , 7—9 or in Vico and Herder a, 8—11 , who were also decisive figures in the first account.
Other scholars have credited other figures in the history of philosophy, such as Aristotle, with pluralism Nussbaum , Evans In Germany, Dilthey came close to pluralism, and Max Weber presented a dramatic, forceful picture of the tragic conflict between incommensurable values, belief systems and ways of life Weber , esp. Weber , esp. Brogan This essay, drawing on Aristotle, and focusing on literary and cultural criticism rather than philosophy proper, made the case for epistemological and methodological, rather than ethical, pluralism.
Berlin criticised the belief in, and search for, a single method or theory, which could serve as a master key for understanding all experience. He insisted that, on the contrary, different standards, values and methods of enquiry are appropriate for different activities, disciplines and facets of life. In this can be seen the seeds of his later work on the differences between the sciences and the humanities, of his attacks on systematic explanatory schemes, and of his value pluralism; but all these ideas had yet to be developed or applied.
Berlin was further nudged towards pluralism by discovering what he saw as a suggestion by Nicolas Malebranche that simplicity and goodness are incompatible , e. Berlin referred to pluralism and monism as basic, conflicting attitudes to life in Berlin et al.
But his use of the term and his explication of the concept did not fully come together, it appears, until Two Concepts of Liberty ; even then, his articulation of pluralism is incomplete in the first draft of the essay.
Late in his life, taking stock of his career, and trying to communicate what he felt to be his most important philosophical insights, Berlin increasingly devoted himself to the explicit articulation and refinement of pluralism as an ethical theory. One problem that has bedevilled the debate is a persistent failure to define the terms at issue with adequate clarity and precision. Pluralism, of course, has been the subject of repeated definition by Berlin and others the repetition not always serving a clarifying purpose.
Whether pluralism can be distinguished from relativism depends largely on how relativism is defined, as well as on how certain obscure or controversial components of pluralism are treated. It should also be noted that the question of whether values are plural is logically distinct from the question of whether they are objective, despite the frequent elision of the two topics in the literature on this subject.
One way of defining relativism is as a form of subjectivism or moral irrationalism. This is how Berlin defined it in his attempts to refute the charge of relativism brought against his pluralism. This view rests on a belief in a basic, minimum, universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief have taken across time and place. Berlin seems to have believed in such a faculty, and linked it to empathy, but did not develop this view in his writings.
Yet another way of defining relativism is to view it as holding that things have value only relative to particular situations or outlooks; nothing is intrinsically good — that is, valuable in and for itself. A slightly different way of putting this would be to maintain that there are no such things as values that are always valid; values are valid to different degrees in different circumstances, but not others.
For instance, liberty may be a leading value in one place at one time, but has a much lower status as a value at another. Berlin admitted that liberty, for instance, had historically been upheld as a pre-eminent ideal only by a minority of human beings; yet he still held it to be a genuine value for all human beings, everywhere, because of the way that human beings are constituted, and, so far as we know, will continue to be constituted.
Hollis , 36 , and by denying that the competing values may be, and often are, binding on all people. This is not a position that Berlin explicitly advances; but his later writings suggest a sympathy for it. But Berlin did hold that, as an empirical matter, most individuals do make decisions about how to balance, reconcile, or choose between competing values in light of their existing general commitments and visions of life, which are shaped though not completely determined by cultural tradition and context.
Liberty may be a genuine, and important, good for human beings in general; but how human beings decide to promote or actualise liberty in relation to a whole web of other values will differ between different societies. The claim that values are objective in being founded on or expressions of and limited by certain realities of human nature would seem to provide a defence against relativism, in holding that there is an underlying, shared human nature which makes at least some values non-relative.
The argument that values are objective simply because they are pursued by human beings may seem to allow for relativism, if it makes the validity of values dependent on nothing but human preferences, and allows any values actually pursued by human beings and, therefore, any practices adopted in pursuing those values to claim validity.
One can make a three-way distinction, between weak incommensurability, moderate incommensurability and radical incommensurability. Weak incommensurability is the view that values cannot be ranked quantitatively, but can be arranged in a qualitative hierarchy that applies consistently in all cases. Berlin goes further than this, but it is not clear whether he presents a moderate or a radical version of incommensurability.
This view is certainly consistent with all that Berlin wrote from the s onwards. Berlin does sometimes offer more starkly dramatic accounts of incommensurability, which make it hard to rule out the more radical interpretation of the concept, according to which incommensurability is more or less synonymous with incomparability.
But plumping need not be a disembodied, inexplicable act: it can draw, albeit subconsciously, on a hinterland of moral understanding rooted in the moral experience of the plumper and in his cultural tradition. A related question concerns the role of reason in moral deliberation. If values are incommensurable, must all choices between conflicting values be ultimately subjective or irrational? If so, how does pluralism differ from radical relativism and subjectivism?
If not, how, exactly, does moral reasoning work? How can we rationally make choices between values when there is no system or unit of measurement that can be used in making such deliberations? One possible answer to the last question is to offer an account of practical, situational reasoning that is not quantitative or rule-based, but appeals to the moral sense mentioned above. This is what Berlin suggests; but, once again, he does not offer a systematic explanation of the nature of non-systematic reason.
On incommensurability see Chang and Crowder In the area of political philosophy, the most widespread controversy over pluralism concerns its relationship to liberalism. However, there are some who maintain that, while pluralism is distinct from, and preferable to, relativism, it is nevertheless too radical, contested and subversive to be be depended on for a justification of liberalism or, conversely, that liberalism is too universalistic or absolutist to be linked to pluralism.
The main proponent of this view, more responsible than any other thinker for the emergence and wide discussion of this issue, is John Gray see, especially, Gray Gray asserts that pluralism is true, that pluralism undermines liberalism, and that therefore liberalism should be abandoned, at least in its traditional role of a political philosophy claiming universal status.
Some theorists have agreed with Gray Kekes, , ; others have sought to show that pluralism and liberalism are reconcilable, although this reconciliation may require modifications to both liberalism and pluralism — modifications that are, however, justifiable, and indeed inherently desirable. The most extensive discussions to date are those by George Crowder and William Galston Crowder , , , Galston , Berlin himself was devoted both to pluralism and to liberalism, which he saw not as related by logical entailment though he sometimes comes close to positing this: e.
The version of pluralism he advanced was distinctly liberal in its assumptions, aims and conclusions, just as his liberalism was distinctly pluralist. UD , CTH2 , and 2. In Two Concepts of Liberty Berlin sought to explain the difference between two out of more than two hundred, he said different ways of thinking about political liberty.
These, he said, had run through modern thought, and were central to the ideological struggles of his day. Berlin called these two conceptions of liberty negative and positive. Negative liberty Berlin initially defined as freedom from , that is, the absence of constraints on the agent imposed by other people. Positive liberty he defined both as freedom to , that is, the ability not just the opportunity to pursue and achieve willed goals; and also as autonomy or self-rule, as opposed to dependence on others.
These are not the same. He associated negative liberty with the liberal tradition as it had emerged and developed in Britain and France from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. He later regretted that he had not made more of the evils that negative liberty had been used to justify, such as exploitation under laissez-faire capitalism; in Two Concepts , however, negative liberty is portrayed favourably, and briefly.
It is on positive liberty that Berlin focused, since it was, he claimed, both a more ambiguous concept, and one which had been subject to greater and more sinister transformation, and ultimately perversion. Berlin traced positive liberty back to theories that focus on the autonomy, or capacity for self-rule, of the agent. By this, Berlin alleged, Rousseau meant, essentially, the common or public interest — that is, what was best for all citizens qua citizens.
The general will was quite independent of, and would often be at odds with, the selfish wills of individuals, who, Rousseau charged, were often deluded as to their own genuine interests. Second, it rested on a bogus transformation of the concept of the self.
In his doctrine of the general will Rousseau moved from the conventional and, Berlin insisted, correct view of the self as individual to the self as citizen — which for Rousseau meant the individual as member of a larger community, an individual whose identity and well-being were exactly the same as those of the larger community.
On this view, the individual achieves freedom only through renunciation of his or her desires and beliefs as an individual and submersion in a larger group. Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist—Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting — and often sacrificing — them to larger groups or principles.
This account is subject to serious and plausible objections, on both historical and conceptual grounds. Berlin has often been interpreted, not entirely unreasonably, as a staunch enemy of the concept of positive liberty. This was simply false, and elides opposition to distortions of positive liberty with opposition to positive liberty itself.
Berlin regarded both concepts of liberty as centring on valid claims about what is necessary and good for human beings; both negative and positive liberty were for him genuine values, which might in some cases clash, but in other cases could be combined and might even be mutually interdependent.
0コメント