Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries 3030731774, 9783030731779

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Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries Johnny Lyons

Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries

Johnny Lyons

Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries

Johnny Lyons Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-73177-9    ISBN 978-3-030-73178-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of my Dad

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. Isaiah Berlin, The Listener—26 January, 1978.

Unique Selling Points

1. Explores the character and implications of Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of pluralism in a dialectically original and illuminating way. 2. Reveals the philosophically fundamental aspects of Berlin’s undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. 3. Provides not only a comparative account of the ideas of Berlin and several other major twentieth-­ century philosophers, but, more broadly, a vivid insight into the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament.

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Acknowledgements

One of the welcome things about having this book published is the opportunity it affords to thank those who helped me produce it. I am pleased, therefore, to record my gratitude to Quassim Cassam, Jason Ferrell, Samuel Guttenplan, Henry Hardy, Eddie Hyland, Rowan Manahan, Stephen Mulhall, Mark Rowe and Quentin Skinner for their kindness in agreeing to read and comment on earlier drafts of part or all of this work. I would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan, especially Brendan George, for deciding to publish my text as well as three anonymous referees for their constructively critical remarks. I reserve my deepest gratitude for my father, John P.  Lyons (1938–2019), to whose memory I dedicate this book. Among the wonderful gifts that he and my mum gave me was the chance to pursue a university education. For that and much else I remain immeasurably in their debt. Dublin, June 2021

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 The Aims, Scope and Structure of the Book   5 The Sciences and the Humanities  12 But Why Should Anyone Care?  20 2 Berlin and A. J. Ayer on Morality 27 The Emotive Theory of Morality  29 Berlin’s Pluralist Theory of Morality: Part One  33 Facts and Values  37 Berlin’s Pluralist Theory of Morality: Part Two  41 Knowledge, Truth and Morals  52 Metaethical Judgments and Normative Convictions  60 3 Berlin and J. L. Austin on Philosophy 69 It Depends on What You Mean by …  70 The Linguistic Method  76 The Implacability of Philosophical Questions  94 Thought and Reality 105 Philosophy and Human Understanding 111 4 Berlin and P. F. Strawson on Freedom125 The Silence of Determinism 127 Truth and Freedom 133 Reason and Freedom 136 xiii

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Contents

Living with/Under/Without Illusion 140 God, Freedom and Belief 147 Back to the Future 153 Exact and Inexact Knowledge 157 Liberal Freedom and Human Needs 162 5 Berlin and Quentin Skinner on History173 Plamenatz’s Proposal 173 Skinner’s Sting 176 Berlin’s Rapprochement 190 Philosophy and / or / as History 197 A Phoney War or a Genuine Conflict? 202 Incommensurable Forms of Life Versus One Pluralist World 205 6 Berlin and Bernard Williams on Liberalism215 Williams’ Historicist Turn 218 Thinking for Ourselves 224 Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 228 From Pluralism to Liberalism and Back Again or Against Abstract Simplification 244 7 Conclusion263 A Faustian Choice? 265 But Does Philosophy Make any Progress? 273 Dealing with the Mess 283 Selected Bibliography289 Index295

About the Author

Johnny Lyons  is a graduate of Christian Brothers College, Monkstown, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. After a six-year spell teaching political theory at Trinity College Dublin, he joined the commercial world in 1999, where he works in corporate communications and change management. Lyons is the author of the critically acclaimed The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin as well as a contributor to Society, the Dublin Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. In 2021, he became Managing Editor and Book Review Editor of the humanities and social science journal, Society. Further information about Johnny Lyons is available on his website at https://johnnylyons.org/.

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Abbreviations1

A AC B CC CIB CTH E F

Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (2015: London, Chatto and Windus) Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Roger Hausheer (1979), 2nd ed., foreword by Mark Lilla (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press) Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (2013: London, Chatto and Windus) Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Bernard Williams (1978), 2nd. ed., foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press) Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Ramin Jahanbegloo (1992: 2007 ed.: London, Halban Publishers) The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (1990), 2nd ed., foreword by John Banville (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press) Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (2009: London, Chatto & Windus) Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (2004: London, Chatto & Windus); initially published in the US as Letters 1928–1946 (2004: New York, Cambridge University Press)

1  The abbreviations of Berlin’s works listed above, which do not include all his published writings, are used throughout the book. Abbreviations for the latest editions of Isaiah Berlin’s works add the relevant number, so that, e.g., RT2 stands for the second edition of Russian Thinkers.

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xviii  HF IBVL L PI RT POI SR TCE

ABBREVIATIONS

The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953), 2nd. ed., ed. Henry Hardy, foreword by Michael Ignatieff (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press) The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy, essay on ‘Berlin and His Critics’ by Ian Harris (2002: Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press) Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Noel Annan (1980), 3rd ed., foreword by Hermione Lee (2014: Princeton, Princeton University Press) Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, introduction by Aileen Kelly (1978), 2nd ed., revised by Henry Hardy, glossary by Jason Ferrell (2008: London, Penguin Classics) The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (2000), 2nd ed., foreword by Avishai Margalit (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press) The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Patrick Gardiner, foreword by Timothy Snyder (1996), 2nd ed. (2019: Princeton, Princeton University Press) Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (2000), 2nd. ed., foreword by Jonathan Israel (2013: Princeton, Princeton University Press)

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Absolute relativism, qualified relativism and bounded pluralism Limited relativism

207 210

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

No man is an island John Donne, Meditation 17, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

John Donne’s words are as germane to the loner as they are to the socialiser. Their truth reveals itself not just in the banal sense that even the most solitary and isolated among us must rely occasionally on our fellow humans for basic survival. It also discloses itself more unobviously in the way that our very understanding of ourselves and others does not happen ex nihilo. The world into which we are born provides the inescapable context of our thought and conduct, including thoughts about living in hermetic isolation. And one of the deep and paradoxical features of our understanding is that it contains more than one credible and valuable view of the world. The more profound aspect of our sociality is especially rich in meaning, giving rise to several arresting philosophical perplexities. One of the most salient centres on the discrepancy between those of our thoughts which refer to reality as it is independently of us and those which seek to capture the world as we experience it in our daily lives, in what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl referred to as the ‘Lebenswelt’ or Lifeworld. This difference is sometimes characterised in philosophical circles as the tension between the view from nowhere (sub specie aeternitatis) and the view from here and now (sub specie temporis). There are those, for instance, who claim that only science is capable of providing a truly objective and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6_1

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complete account of reality, of adding to the storehouse of unchanging and infallible human knowledge, while others who argue that the truths produced by or derivable from science do not exhaust all available human understanding and truth. Those in the former category tend to align philosophy with the scientific model and methods of enquiry while those in the latter are more prone to identifying the discipline in broadly humanistic or, at least, non-scientific terms. Furthermore, there is much debate and disagreement about what, if any, constitutes the optimal account of the world within and not just between the naturalistic and humanistic standpoints: there are, evidently, various scientific views of the material world just as there is a multiplicity of non-scientific ways of making sense of the lived reality of human life. This helps explain why the distinguished  philosopher Hilary Putnam considered pluralism among ‘the most important and difficult topics of our time’, adding: In truth, the ‘difficulty’ of dealing with pluralism is as much human and political – learning how to live together in a world in which diversity can no longer be ignored and unity cannot be achieved by the method of authority’ – as it is intellectual.1

This volume examines a plurality of different ways of grasping the world and our complex relation to it in a way that seeks to amplify their distinctively philosophical underpinnings. More specifically, it explores how the various conceptions of philosophy of Berlin, the book’s protagonist, and other significant philosophers of his time inform their beliefs about a number of fundamental questions. The questions themselves were important not just to Berlin and his interlocutors but are among the most difficult and enduring problems of philosophy. They include ‘Is morality objective?’, ‘What is the nature of philosophy?‘, ‘Do we have free will?’, ‘Is history indispensable to philosophy?’ and ‘What, if any, is the basis of a free and tolerant society?’. Each of these topics is given a chapter and each chapter considers how Berlin and one of his contemporaries treat it. But, as will become clear, these large and difficult questions are connected to one another in all kinds of fundamental ways. Registering how they are related and emphasising the importance of these relationships form a vital component of our enquiry. Berlin and his interlocutors view philosophy as one rather than a collection of essentially autonomous  and specialised  Hilary Putnam in Foreword to Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram eds., Pluralism: the philosophy and politics of diversity (2000: Routledge, London), xi. 1

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elements. They see philosophy as a tree with several necessarily connected and interweaving branches rather than as a bocage landscape of separate, self-contained fields and sub-fields. Seeing philosophy as one does not entail that its various and disparate elements form a pre-existing or coherent whole or are even reconcilable with each other. It suggests only that the different and interlocking parts of the subject are inseparable and that genuine philosophical discussion tends to be all-consuming. This study grew out of my previous book on Berlin. While working on The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin it struck me with increasing force that Berlin’s pluralist philosophical vision might assert itself more perspicaciously against the background of the ideas of a number of his leading contemporaries. What I mean by pluralism here is the claim that there is more than one valid way of understanding the world, that there exists a diversity of cognitively meaningful yet competing pictures of reality and our relation to it. This notion of philosophical or epistemological pluralism grounds Berlin’s more explicit and celebrated idea of value pluralism which claims that there exists a plurality of irreducibly heterogenous and conflicting human values and ways of life. Unearthing Berlin’s deeper philosophical pluralism makes possible a better understanding of his more renowned value pluralism. It also enables us to see that while his seemingly unconnected intellectual interests and ideas may not be all of a seamless piece, they are more of a piece than is commonly recognised in academic circles. Berlin is a systematically unsystematic thinker but for strongly philosophical reasons. By the time that book was completed I had arrived at a further discovery, namely, that the central views of a number of Berlin’s eminent philosophical contemporaries could be examined more productively in the light of his thought. A comparative study can prompt us to peel back the layers of each thinker’s outlook in interesting ways and get closer to the heart of their thought. The result is that we don’t just get a intriguing insight into the worldviews of six influential philosophers but we achieve a better grasp of philosophy as a whole, one that changes our sense of what is philosophically possible and worthwhile. This is, of course, no accident. A common trait of authentic philosophers is their tendency not to suffer from the hubristic delusion that they are bigger and better than the subject itself. With perhaps one exception, each of the thinkers featured in this study provides a greater sense of the profound reality and difficulty of each of the big questions that are discussed and of the space a recognition of their reality and difficulty creates for a freer and more fruitful intellectual enquiry. Thus, in an apt way, the book ends up being

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less about Berlin and his interlocutors and more about the point and value of philosophy itself. It is also one that leaves us with far more questions than answers. This too feels right since it resonates with a distinction Berlin was fond of making between an intellectual and a member of the intelligentsia; whereas intellectuals are comfortable with the idea that there are more genuine questions in the world than conclusive answers, the intelligentsia’s members, he argues, are committed to the idea that a real question is bound to have a definitive answer.2 Berlin felt that philosophers belonged very much to the first group. His own preoccupation with several of philosophy’s most intractable problems led him to carve out new intellectual spaces and adopt a different style of philosophical expression so that he could do greater justice to the richness of these problems. He was keen to write about human affairs in a new and different register that would in turn prove capable of revealing new and worthwhile insights. His mode of theorising succeeded in showing us that a more realistic and imaginative concern with philosophy’s problems, rather than their alleged solutions, can lead us to change how we conceive philosophy and its relation to the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in Berlin’s readiness to challenge some of the more potent assumptions and doctrines of orthodox philosophical thinking and to affirm, where appropriate, the lessons and authority of the world of common human experience in opposition to the received wisdom of much of traditional and contemporary philosophy. And yet what emerges from Berlin’s writings is less an anti-philosophical diatribe than a refreshingly honest and incandescent philosophical outlook, one which encapsulates the sentiment in the opening section of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, best still a man.’3 Berlin is concerned with reorienting our view of what philosophy is and can be.

2  Amos Oz. ‘On Isaiah Berlin’ in Joshua L.  Cherniss and Steven B.  Smith eds., The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 11. 3  David Hume, ‘Of the Different Species of Philosophy’, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. By Peter Millican (1748, 2007 ed.: Oxford World Classics, Oxford), 6.

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The Aims, Scope and Structure of the Book The purpose of this book is threefold. Firstly, to discuss Berlin’s outlook in the company of several of his contemporaries by comparing and contrasting their respective views across a range of large and persistent philosophical questions. As the contents page indicates, several of the most renowned philosophical figures since World War II feature in this study, including Berlin’s own Oxford colleagues A.  J. Ayer, J.  L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson as well as two notable thinkers from the generation immediately succeeding Berlin’s, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner. Williams and Skinner may not strictly qualify as contemporaries of Berlin or what Maurice Bowra, the notorious Oxford classicist and wit, would have considered as members of ‘Our Age’, but they are sufficiently contemporary for the purposes of this study.4 Other Oxbridge philosophers who feature less prominently in this study include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart. The second goal is to show that Berlin merits being viewed as a significant philosopher in his own right, a thinker whose core philosophical vision makes up the structuring element of his celebrated contribution as a liberal political theorist and historian of ideas. Berlin has been under-philosophised and over-politicised by critics with the result that a misleadingly one-sided and superficial picture of his outlook has emerged. I seek to correct this imbalance. Identifying and elucidating the philosophical foundations of his moral and political ideas enriches our understanding of his contribution to human understanding since it reveals the deep and inextricable connections between his philosophical and normative views. His way of thinking about our predicament upends the assumptions and methods of conventional political theory; he dispenses with the orthodox distinction between theory and practice in which the realities of our ethical and political lives are judged by the standards of some highly abstract and rationalistic set of theoretical criteria and replaces it with a very different, polymorphous form of reflective thinking about the human condition which recasts our understanding of the dialectic between theory and practice, philosophy and everyday reality. Readers of my previous book will recognise that what follows forms part of my broader ambition to show that making sense of 4  Maurice Bowra’s definition of ‘Our Age’ referred to those who came of age and went to Oxbridge between 1919 and 1949. See Noel Annan, Our Age: the generation that made postwar Britain (1990: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London), 3.

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Berlin can only be achieved by getting a better grasp of his humanistic and historical conception of philosophy. On one level, Berlin himself provides the greatest obstacle to being interpreted through a vigorously philosophical lens. For a start, he did not produce the kind of chapter and verse that the academy typically regards as indispensable to be taken seriously as a genuine philosopher.5 Nor did he convey his ideas in the prevailing style of orthodox analytic philosophers. Accordingly, one can understand why Berlin’s critics view his ‘philosophy’ as too imprecise, fragmentary and his style too orotund to justify him being treated in any kind of robustly philosophical way. After all, Berlin was fond of saying that he only produced copy on request rather than on his own initiative – ‘I think I have always written to order, in answer to commissions; like a taxi, unless summoned I stay still.’ (A 539). And yet we needn’t (and shouldn’t) allow such occasional, self-deprecating declarations obscure the underlying unity and seriousness of his philosophical outlook and message. Nor should we allow the rather constricted and constricting expectations of contemporary analytic theorists obscure the broad originality of Berlin’s philosophical work. Berlin is not so much an inherently impressionistic or dispersed intelligence – his philosophical papers from the mid-1930s to early 1950s reveal that to be conclusively untrue  – as a thinker who came to see that the pallid formalities and unanchored abstractions characteristic of the increasingly dominant style of post-war Oxford philosophy were both uninspiring and unhelpful. Moreover, his reasons for resisting the then mainstream academic style of monolinear argumentation are philosophically deep rather than superficial. His scepticism about analytic and much traditional moral and political philosophy is rooted in a conviction that it is drastically untempered by a recognition of the concrete and ragged reality of human experience. The raw material of actual, ordinary life is not susceptible to being captured in strenuously logical thought and sternly formal language. There is a sense in which Berlin’s philosophical vision shares the pragmatist spirit of C. S. Peirce’s memorable remark that:

5  This is a different kind of difficulty from the one which all Berlin’s commentators inevitably face when they embark on writing about him, namely, that it can seem redundant given that he expressed his own ideas with enviable lucidity, vividness and cogency.

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We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, – but must begin with men and their conversation.6

Berlin felt that the irrepressible contingency and pervasive untidiness of human affairs can be brought to light only allusively and in a necessarily contextual, partial and finite manner. This required a new way of theorising about the human experience that combines a faithfulness to its subject matter without forsaking a concern with objectivity and truth. Indeed, Berlin’s approach forces us to rethink the notions of objectivity and truth and their relation to a proper understanding of humanity in arresting ways. It also prompted him to adopt a new way of writing philosophy that does not conform to the dominant style of dry abstraction and logical consistency. His imaginatively engaged and ethically charged studies of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Herzen, Vico, Machiavelli, Herder, Hamann and others represent his own inimitable and unparochial efforts to convey the happenstance of human life. Nonetheless, he also articulated his humanistic perspective or what he called  occasionally ‘a sense of reality’, in a less oblique fashion in his more identifiably philosophical writings which were written, in large part, before he made the post-war move to pursuing philosophy by more historical and imaginative means. Berlin stated in the Preface to Concepts and Categories that he changed from philosophy to the history of ideas because he wanted to know more at the end of his life than he knew at the start. One of the motivations for making this transition rested on his realisation that our understanding of the world of human affairs is necessarily limited, situated and incomplete but no less rational and objective for that. This discovery is evident in his pre- and immediately post-war philosophical works which in turn provide the basis of his approach to the history of ideas and his pluralist defence of liberalism. Putting Berlin on the philosophical map entails putting history firmly on that map too. Historically-informed philosophy inhibits philosophy from abstracting itself from the true source of many of its insights, namely, the human world in which we make sense of and live our lives. The third and final aim of this book is to fulfil the first two in clear prose and without presupposing, on the part of the reader, a prior knowledge of the subject. I have found the final task the most challenging of all. Albert Einstein’s 6  C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 8, edited by Arthur Burks (1958: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), Section 112.

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salutary statement that ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough’ may be true but it’s easier said than done. I take some comfort, however, from P. F. Strawson’s comment that while it is possible to write an introduction to philosophy, it’s impossible to write an elementary introduction to the subject since ‘there is no shallow end to the philosophical pool.’7 A basic tenet of my approach is that the categories and concepts of thought underlying the worldviews of the various thinkers discussed in this study are sufficiently shared to permit a valid and instructive comparison of their different and often rival philosophical outlooks. Naturally, not all the philosophical questions that were central to Berlin receive the same degree of attention from his fellow philosophers. This inevitable gap is addressed by choosing those among Berlin’s contemporaries who have significant, if often incompatible, things to say about philosophical themes which he considered of vital human interest. Another trait that these thinkers exemplify is a recognition that philosophical problems tend to occupy several branches of the subject at once and therefore cannot be treated in any depth without exploring the distinct yet interconnected areas of a particular problem. In this respect, and as I indicated already, their way of pursuing philosophy is the opposite of how most contemporary academic philosophers practise the subject: today’s professional philosophers specialise in a particular ‘field’ or ‘sub-field’ of the subject where they frequently spend their entire careers without venturing into other ‘fields’ of the discipline. The thinkers who feature in this book do philosophy in the way that virtually all authentic philosophers have tended to pursue the subject down the ages, that is, by regarding it as a single discipline in which a consideration of one particular branch of philosophy doesn’t just relate to other branches of philosophy but cannot be properly addressed without confronting and resolving matters in other, perhaps even recondite, branches of subject. Why restrict the scope of our enquiry to comparing Berlin with his immediate Oxbridge contemporaries? Surely it would make more sense to spread the net wider and include thinkers beyond his own period and place? One can offer a number of responses to this kind of objection. In the first place, while it would undoubtedly be feasible to include a more diverse group of thinkers, it doesn’t follow that a longer and/or wider lens 7  P.  F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (1992: Oxford University Press, Oxford), vii.

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diminishes the value of a relatively short and narrow one. Secondly, there are special reasons for comparing Berlin with his mainly Oxford colleagues. We know that Berlin was familiar with their ideas and vice versa. Moreover, Oxford could claim to be the centre of the English-speaking philosophical world when Berlin and his interlocutors were at their intellectual peak, for this was the golden age of what was referred to as Oxford ordinary language philosophy. It was also a period in which a revolution in philosophy was thought to have occurred.8 The revolution was two-pronged: it was committed to weeding out the metaphysical extravagances of traditional philosophy and, more constructively, to transforming philosophy into a wholly linguistic business, in the sense of putting the analysis and elucidation of language, especially key concepts, at the core of the philosophical project. The linguistic philosophers were preoccupied with language not principally for the reasons a lexicographer or grammarian is concerned with words but rather to gain a proper grasp of its meaning and use in human communication which in turn would provide a more reliable understanding of human thought and experience. Most importantly, though, all the thinkers who feature in this book had something new and interesting to say about questions of vital philosophical interest, including the claim that certain age-old questions should cease to be of vital philosophical concern. The relevance of the last point is worth elaborating given the prevalence of the pejorative view of analytic philosophy that existed at the time and that has survived in several influential quarters ever since. The most common complaint made against the style of linguistic philosophy practiced in Oxbridge immediately before and after World War II asserted that it was excessively scholastic and ludicrously remote from the everyday world of sensible, well-adjusted adults. This unfavourable characterisation of what linguistic philosophers were doing is untrue and unfair. Untrue because they believed that their radically new way of doing philosophy recalled the subject to the everyday, human world. Unfair because they regarded themselves as serious and intelligent professionals who were intent on grappling with complex questions of important and practical interest. The following anecdote about J. L. Austin, the doyen of Oxford

8  The Revolution in Philosophy, A.  J. Ayer et  al. (1956: Macmillan, London). See also G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy Since 1900 (1969: Oxford University Press, Oxford) for an informed and sceptical critique of ‘the revolution in philosophy’, esp. 111–120.

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ordinary language philosophy, gives a flavour of the intellectual spirit that informed the new generation of linguistic philosophers at the time. There’s a remark of Austin’s which was famous at the time. He would give these seminars discussing the differences between doing something inadvertently, by mistake, accidentally, and so forth, and at some point some visitor would often say: ‘Professor Austin, what great problems of philosophy are illuminated by these enquiries?’ To which Austin would reply: ‘Roughly: all of them.’9

This account captures the ironic, disarming tone that typified the Oxonian philosophical style. It also reveals the risks to which it was especially vulnerable. While thinkers such as Austin sincerely believed that the new method of linguistic analysis could produce real conceptual progress, it was precisely the way that he and others went about pursuing it that prompted the uninitiated and theoretically unsympathetic to dismiss their approach as either boring or footling or both. Part of what follows seeks to determine the extent to which such unflattering attitudes to the linguistic style of philosophy are warranted.10 This book is primarily a work of philosophical reflection rather than a study in the sociology of recent Anglophone philosophy. As indicated, my main interest is to critically discuss the nature and validity of the views of Berlin and his contemporaries on a number of central  philosophical 9  Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (1978: BBC Books, London), 140. Hereafter referred to as MOI.  Oxford University Press renamed the book Talking Philosophy in 1982 when they issued it in paperback. This was a judicious, if overdue, decision given one of the ‘men’ of ideas featured was the distinguished philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. 10  One of the more notorious journalistic-style pieces on the Oxford genre of philosophy was written by Ved Mehta, an extended excerpt of which was published in the New Yorker magazine in 1961. On being asked by Mehta what he thought of his article, Berlin responded as follows:

You ask me what the reactions of my colleagues are to your piece on Oxford Philosophy... [T]hose to whom I have spoken are in various degrees outraged or indignant ... The New Yorker is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth. In any case, only a serious student of philosophy could attempt to do that. … I think your piece is a genuine success in a Toulouse-Lautrec sort of way, (B 77)

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problems. I shall not be especially concerned with the question of who may have anticipated or influenced whom or with situating their ideas in the historical and academic context of the time, an era that is no longer the day before yesterday. A fundamental, if implicit, assumption of the book is that the questions with which Berlin and his contemporaries were concerned did not occur randomly. The philosophical issues they felt deserved attention and the distinctive way in which they responded to them are historically and institutionally situated. This does not mean that the topics they judged crucial have ceased to be so. It is merely to claim that they discussed them in ways that are immersed in the intellectual and institutional climate of the time. Most analytic philosophers have been remarkably unselfconscious about the historical circumstances of their subject, a blind spot that continues to plague the analytic tradition to this day. Philosophy and the history of philosophy are still regarded by the Anglo-­ American philosophical establishment as fundamentally separable and ideally separate domains of enquiry. This attitude strikes me as deeply and damagingly wrong. Berlin and four of the five interlocutors who feature in this study help us to see not only why it is so wrong and regrettable but, more positively, how a philosophically honest and helpful quest for human understanding is largely idle without being historically informed as well as historically self-reflective. The book is structured in a way that is intended to incrementally build up my underlying thesis. The main argument of what follows is to show that Berlin and all but one of his interlocutors share comparable ways of reflecting upon human thought and practice, what might be described as a kind of high-level anthropology. What binds them together is a recognition that context provides a vital key to making sense of the social and political world. More specifically, there are three major thematic preoccupations and one methodological principle that hold the dialogues together; the three themes include pluralism, freedom and liberalism and the methodological matter is the contribution of the contingency of context in its intellectual, historical, and cultural dimensions to shaping and comprehending our situation. The odd philosopher out is A. J. Ayer. The point of including Ayer is explained by why we begin with him. Ayer’s narrowly scientific and fundamentally ahistorical conception of philosophy, which is rooted in his logical positivist inheritance, separates him decisively from the others. The second chapter discusses the nature and limitations of Ayer’s view of the philosophical enterprise through a comparative discussion of his view of morality with that of Berlin. Its aim is

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threefold. To provide a  revealing  (as distinct from a blank) contrast between both thinkers’ ideas of ethics and, more fundamentally, their conceptions of philosophy and everyday life from which their views about ethics spring. Next, to set up the challenge that Berlin’s outlook must meet to be taken seriously as a philosopher. And, finally, to introduce readers who are unfamiliar with Berlin’s thought to the more elementary features of his political theory. The four subsequent chapters constitute the interpretive heart of the book. They are focused on identifying the rich affinities yet fundamental differences between Berlin and his philosophical contemporaries through a comparative exploration of their views across a range of distinct yet related philosophical problems. Each of these dialogues shows how Berlin and his interlocutors exemplify a basically contextual approach, albeit in crucially divergent ways, in their treatment of a broad philosophical topic. Moreover, the sequence of the chapters is intended to build up towards the concluding dialogue in which the various and related strands – freedom, pluralism, liberalism and methodological contextualism – feature and combine together. So the book’s structure can be described as opening with a rather outdated, if still popular, concerto, followed by four more complex variations on three related themes and a unifying methodology featuring Berlin in all the movements. If the musical metaphor can be pushed a little further, I have sought to let the score speak for itself without explicity declaring its various themes and underpinning structure.

The Sciences and the Humanities While intellectual and historical context can explain a great deal about our assumptions and ideas, it does not do so without remainder. We can recognise that the manner in which Berlin and others posed the questions they felt worth considering reflected their time and place without taking the extra relativist step of insisting that their questions were meaningful and relevant to them and them alone. It makes more sense to interpret the problems they were concerned with as having two sides: the first consists in the general and recalcitrant features of certain philosophical problems, the second in their local and concrete manifestation. It is generally agreed, for instance, that the problem of the objectivity of morality has been around in one form or other since at least ancient Greece, but that shouldn’t imply that philosophers in the intervening two and half

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millennia have treated the problem in the same way or with the same set of presuppositions and preoccupations as Plato and Protagoras did. The same goes for most of the topics we shall be discussing in this book, with the exception of the chapters on history and liberalism – themes that have a peculiarly modern flavour. There is, in other words, a possible middle way between the unsustainable innocence of philosophia perennis, the view that the so-called eternal questions of philosophy exist magically outside time and space, and wholesale (and typically self-defeating) historical and epistemological relativism, the opposite view that the philosophical problems of each epoch are historically embedded and normatively frozen all the way down and therefore of no genuine extra-historical philosophical pertinence to succeeding (or, presumably, antecedent) epochs and cultures. I shall be proposing that such a middle path is available and worth pursuing. Roughly speaking, the claim that there exists a multiplicity of interpretive options within such a via media is based on the core idea that there are certain background cognitive and evaluative assumptions that all of us share for human thought and intelligibility to get off the ground. This is effectively the Berlinian view that posits as an evaluative fact that there exists a ‘a common human nature’ which makes possible communication between human beings across time and space (CTH2 317). It is this notion of a common, if exiguous, human nature that grounds his argument there are certain normative facts about human beings that in turn allow us to claim that, for instance, torturing people for fun is uncontroversially wrong, that Hitler and Stalin were objectively evil or that compassion is preferable to cruelty and so forth. The extent to which Berlin’s account of what he called the ‘human horizon’ has just enough normative content and authority to provide more than a merely platitudinous pretext for the ambitious reach of his moral and political theory will be one of our central concerns. But whatever about the mutual intelligibility and comparability of long-­ dead thinkers and radically different forms of human society, it is far from clear that we can satisfactorily reconcile the presuppositions and aims of the naturalistic and humanistic perspectives. An insight that I hope emerges from our discussion is that there does not exist one, uniquely superior and complete model for describing the world, that there are, on the contrary, a plurality of distinct and valid sources of human understanding that are irreducibly incommensurable. But how, one may ask, could that be true? How could there be true but fundamentally different ways of describing and making sense of the world? Addressing that large and

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difficult question is another major preoccupation of this book, but it may be helpful at this point if I make a few preliminary remarks about it. The assertion that there are various yet valid ways of grasping reality will likely strike the reader as a straightforward category error, stemming from a conflation of our putatively uncontested knowledge of the natural world with that of our subjective experience of the human world. Once this muddle is exposed and cleared up, the argument goes, we can return to the sane arena of scientifically-informed common sense in which there is indeed one true account of the natural or physical world that is distinguishable from other realms of human enquiry. There is an objective world of a difference between mountains and morals and nothing but confusion and soft-headedness can result from denying or obfuscating the metaphysical and epistemological necessity of such a dichotomy. However, on further reflection, several philosophical difficulties arise in response to this all too quick and easy reaction. The first is that it tends to rely on an excessively naïve view of our grasp of the natural world. In short, it falls victim to assuming that our understanding of physical, material reality is irrevocably and uniquely right since it corresponds to the way the world is anyway, independently of how we happen to apprehend it. The problem with this robustly realist intuition is that it fails to acknowledge the ways in which the human mind plays a significant and unalterable part in apprehending the natural world as it is in itself or non-perspectively. The world can’t be known without a knower and the knower cannot escape the lens of his or her own perceptual apparatus. The robustly realist viewpoint also fails to register that the mind-dependent categories and concepts of thought which contribute inescapably to our picture of material reality have changed over the course of human history. The unavoidable mind-dependedness of our apprehension of physical reality reminds us that our understanding of it is contingent rather than absolute, that our access to the world is always and necessarily mediated by our own subjectivity. None of this, of course, means or implies the insane view that the material reality of the world is something we concoct, that the physical world exists only in our heads as a kind of convenient inter-subjective fiction. A real fire burns things and the idea of a fire doesn’t.11 Acknowledging the mind-dependedness and contingency of our picture of the world does 11  I have lifted this example from Berlin’s fascinating lecture on Berkeley’s understanding of the external world. Berlin’s lecture on Berkeley is published on IBVL at http://berlin. wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/nachlass/berkeley.pdf

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not entail the unhinged belief that there is no actual world beyond our description of it. Nor does it require us to deny that there are epistemologically better and worse accounts of the world. In other words,  the unavailability of omniscience does not entail the inevitability of epistemological anarchy, that, in effect, ‘anything goes’. The general spirit of this point was pithily, if non-philosophically, expressed by the French Prime Minister, George Clemenceau, when he was asked how future historians will judge the First World War: ‘They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.’12 There are certain things we can be objectively confident about even if our grasp of those things falls short of being irreversible and all-knowing. But what a true appreciation of our cognitive condition categorically affirms is that the still common belief that we could obtain an entirely reliable, unimprovable and comprehensive grasp of reality that transcends the contingent limitations of our human perspective is both incoherent as well as impossible (its incoherence is what makes it impossible). It seems our understanding of the world cannot escape the legacy of Kant’s initially counter-intuitive yet transformative idea, his self-proclaimed ‘Copernican revolution’, that the world as we know it is inescapably the result both of the contribution of the noumenal world, of the world as it is in its itself, together with the contribution of our mind-dependent, context-saturated phenomenal view of the world, of the world as it appears to us through the faculties and senses of our mind.13 We cannot escape our own skin and that, in summary, makes the world of a difference. The moment we are prepared to accept the ineliminability of human subjectivity is also the moment we are more disposed to rethink our preand perhaps post-theoretical ideas about the nature of and difference between the sciences and the humanities, especially in relation to the supposed epistemological superiority of the former over the latter. The realisation that there is an irreducibly mental component to our naturalistic view of the world enables us to make far more sense of the history of science. We begin to see that the historical development of the natural sciences is not the scientistic story of the gradual unfolding of an increasingly  Quoted in Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth (2006: Alfred Knopf, New York), 27.  This book makes no pretence of judging the success or otherwise of Kant’s attempt to reconcile the rationalist and empiricist traditions (if indeed his enterprise can be described thus). For an excellent, recent interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, I recommend Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism (2015: Oxford University press, Oxford). 12 13

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irrefutable account of reality, but a much more complicated and unsteady process of trial and error, of breakthroughs and dead ends, progress and paradigm shifts, showing that no scientific truths remain true for ever or, at least, not true in the same way. In other words, the history of science and its contemporary condition show that there is an unbreakable connection between scientific truths and the standards of rationality that prevail at a particular time, and, consequently, that the lessons of science, like those of any other field of enquiry, reflect the historicity and limits of human understanding and reason. This was one of the principal reasons why Karl Popper felt that ‘only a man who understands science (that is, scientific problems) can understand its history ... and that only a man who has a real understanding of its history (the history of its problem situations) can understand science.’14 If anything can be said to be certain it is surely that our current naturalistic picture of the world will be succeeded by a new one in the future, just as the seemingly eternal truths of Newtonian science yielded to the later scientific discoveries of special relativity and quantum mechanics. Such self-conscious reflections are also apt to make us sceptical of our intuitive and frequently muddled beliefs regarding the putative objectivity of the sciences compared with the supposed subjectivity of the humanities. The denial that the world is capable of conferring the truth on our thought in a naively unmediated way can prompt us to seriously doubt the validity of the dichotomy that is commonly thought to exist between the sciences and the humanities. This can result in our taking a more latitudinarian view of objectivity since we are now more open to accepting that disparate forms of enquiry that aspire towards knowledge and truth, including scientific knowledge and truth, cannot escape the context and contribution of our own thoughts and conceptual frameworks. For if it is the case that there is not just a plurality of different ways of understanding the world but that no form of human understanding, whether scientific or not, can occupy an Archimedean standpoint, then it would seem to follow that we can adopt a humanistic perspective in good faith without suffering from misplaced science envy. But we must also careful of not falling into the other trap of thinking that humanistic ways of thinking about distinctively human phenomena can be achieved in self-sufficient isolation.

14  Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, (1973 ed.: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 185.

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Confronting head-on the issue of the perceived tension between the truths of science and truths of ethics was not Berlin’s style. Instead, he produced a particularly vivid picture of the kind of philosophical vista that can open up from exploring the multifarious sources of non-scientific human understanding. Berlin’s original and gripping panorama neither presupposes nor implies that we need to make an invidious choice between the so-called ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences. His agenda is not to defend the humanities at the cost of the sciences – Berlin was an unfailingly staunch defender of the sciences and of their incalculable wonders and benefits – but to affirm the value of the former as a precious and vital source of genuine illumination and knowledge. The following passage, which encapsulates his view of the novelty of Giambattista Vico’s conception of history, gives a flavour of his own capacious yet discriminate humanism: […] to understand history is to understand what men made of the world in which they found themselves, what they demanded of it, what their felt needs, aims, ideals were. He [Vico] seeks to recover their vision of it, he asks what wants, what questions, what aspirations determined a society’s view of reality; and he thinks that he has created a new method which will reveal to him the categories in terms of which men thought and acted and changed themselves and their worlds. This kind of knowledge is not knowledge of facts or of logical truths, provided by observation or the sciences or deductive reasoning; nor is it knowledge of how to do things; nor the knowledge provided by faith, based on divine revelation, in which Vico professed belief. It is more like the knowledge we claim of a friend, of his character, of his ways of thought or action, the intuitive sense of the nuances of personality or feeling or ideas which Montaigne describes so well, and which Montesquieu took into account. (AC2 133)

What this passage also brings to light is the more radical, if largely implicit, pluralism underpinning Berlin’s celebrated account of value pluralism, the thesis that there are a variety of objective values and ways of life that are radically distinct and necessarily irreconcilable with each other in theory and in practice. His more fundamental philosophical pluralism insists that the scientific world view can ever tell us only so much about the world, that it cannot tell us everything that is known or knowable about it and us. No doubt, most scientists might be prepared to concede Berlin’s position to the extent that they would willingly grant that science doesn’t tell us everything about the world that we may care about or wish it to be.

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But where they diverge from Berlin or, more accurately, where Berlin diverges from them is in his claim that those parts of the human world or of human experience that are neither explained nor even acknowledged by science should not be disqualified willy-nilly from the possibility of being objective and right. He is adamant that several of the non-sciences are eminently susceptible to rational treatment and debate and therefore that they should neither be relegated to the sphere of merely arbitrary, non-­ cognitive opinion nor indeed, as the early Wittgenstein austerely insisted, left in self-denying silence. Berlin’s deeper pluralism brings him into philosophical territory that can unnerve political philosophers since it raises all sorts of fundamentally disruptive questions about sacred and entrenched distinctions such as those between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and value, ethical objectivity and moral conflict, scientific truths and humanistic prejudices, and so on (incidentally, a consideration of the more philosophical aspects of Berlin’s vision also raises interesting and challenging questions for his own thought too). The main concern of defenders of orthodox philosophical wisdom is that any blurring or doubting of these distinctions will lead to epistemological chaos. Yet Berlin’s approach suggests that these distinctions have become constricting dichotomies which hinder philosophical advancement. His own outlook betrays a disregard for the orthodoxies which prevail within the analytic tradition. For Berlin, the human condition is as fundamentally a Kantian condition as it is a Humean one, with the various instabilities and antinomies that entails. Moreover, his way of conveying his outlook contrasts sharply with the prevailing conventions of the Anglophone philosophical style which presumes that unless something is stated in plain, direct prose then it is most likely pretentious or empty. Berlin, on the other hand, invariably makes the case for a more inclusive, humanistic and imaginative conception of philosophy, though without any diminution in rigour of thought and clarity of expression. More often than not, he articulates his own conception of philosophy through his inimitable technique of ventriloquising the ideas of thinkers, often long-deceased ones, whom he admires or, at a minimum, considers worthy of our attention.15

15  I am particularly sympathetic to the view of Berlin held by Roger Hausheer, one of his most informed and shrewd readers. Hausheer argues that what makes Berlin an ‘intellectual collossus’ is that he managed to enlighten The Enlightenment by exposing it to the unforgiving yet penetrating critique of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico, Hamann and

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But the relatively oblique character of Berlin’s mode of philosophy should not obscure the crucial point that he is asking us to radically reconceive how we understand the subject and, more generally, rethink our cognitive and ethical predicament. At the core of Berlin’s outlook is an avowal of the human-centredness of ideas which prompts us to appreciate the richness as well as the limits of our thought, a sentiment that is nicely expressed by that very Kantian poet, Wallace Stevens, ‘reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it.’16 The effect can feel paradoxical at times – his writings awaken us to the immense power as well as the inescapable finitude of the human intellect, to the undeniable otherness yet strange familiarity of our historical and philosophical inheritance. And yet the appearance of contradiction gradually recedes with the recognition that even our most enduringly profound ideas are unexceptionally and necessarily the product of ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. Berlin manages to bring philosophy down to earth while jolting us out of our cosy and conventional ways of thinking. An alternative way of saying this might be to claim that Berlin succeeds in capturing both the universality and strangeness of philosophy, its ambivalent capacity to be vindicatory as well as subversive, and to confirm as well as defamiliarise our understanding of the world and our relation to it. One further reflection suggests itself. More than once, Berlin emphasised what he regarded as an acute observation of Bertrand Russell that ‘the central visions of the great philosophers are essentially simple’ and that they should therefore be communicable to ordinary, curious minds (MOI 41). Russell’s remark may be said to apply to the ideas of the thinkers discussed in this book, which is why I have sought to treat them as Herder. Berlin’s thought is a unique and acute synthesis of the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers and their radical critics, a synthesis that does not seek to reconcile but rather bear witness to the true yet irreducibly conflicting insights contained in both currents of thought. See Roger Hausheer, ‘Enlightening the Enlightenment’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler eds., Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (2003: American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), 33–50 as well as his introduction to PSM2. More recently, Steven B. Smith discusses this theme with illuminating effect in ‘Isaiah Berlin on the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’ in Joshua L.  Cherrnis and Steven B.  Smith eds. The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 132–48. 16  Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951: Alfred A. Knopf, New York), 25–6. Stevens’ late poem ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbour’ also captures our Kantian predicament with its emphasis on the impossibility of saying ‘more than human things with human voice,’. See his Collected Poems (1955: Faber & Faber, London), 261.

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directly and as transparently as possible. Moreover, none of the themes they considered worth discussing have become any less compelling. In fact, very little, if anything, that has been written on these central problems during the intervening years supersedes their contributions or renders them wrong or trivial. The substance and style of their writings have stood the test of time remarkably well. This outcome is made more startling given that neither Berlin nor his interlocutors qualify as thinkers of undeniable genius, though they are, undoubtedly,  original, unclaustrophobic and engaging philosophical minds.

But Why Should Anyone Care? This study is not aimed only at readers who have a professional interest in philosophy. It is intended also for a less professionally specialised yet reflective readership, for those who have a general interest in ideas and their presence in our lives. It is likely that philosophy has always been a minority activity but that doesn’t mean it is or ought to be of marginal importance. I like to imagine that those who are attracted to the life of the mind might identify with Clive James’ envisioned view of his readership: I have no other audience in mind except people like myself: generalists repelled by an age of increasing specialization, misfits caught between the active and the contemplative life, hustlers too hard at work to examine at leisure the way the world is going yet incurably athirst for the totality of knowledge – the true, the eternal students. If I am right, and all the forces which made life an out-and-out nightmare in the totalitarian societies are likely, albeit in less toxic form, to go on spoiling the daydream of the democratic ones, then such non-utilitarian concepts as humanity and individuality will always have to be fought for.17

Regrettably, the question of philosophy’s place in society rarely gets the hearing it deserves. Its pertinence has become even harder to establish in the contemporary marketplace of ideas in which the value of an idea is increasingly measured by its popularity rather than its wisdom. It is hard to believe that there was a time, and not that long ago, when eminent philosophers were often asked for their views about the big, pressing issues of the day. Berlin and Ayer, for instance, were guests on The Brains Trust, a BBC radio and television programme broadcast in the 1940s and 1950s  Clive James, Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993–2001 (2001: Picador, London), xvii.

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which featured a panel of experts responding to questions submitted by a public audience. Its appeal is nicely conveyed by one of its producers: How amazing to find Freddie Ayer or Bertrand Russell and to hear them in the flesh – to think that one was part of the same intellectual society or could aspire to be.18

Another philosopher thought to possess a ‘Third Programme mind’ and who featured regularly as a ‘TV don’ was Bernard Williams.19 Moreover, Williams exploited his exceptional gifts as a philosopher and public intellectual by serving on several royal commissions including those on public schools (1965–70), drug abuse (1971), gambling (1976–9) and then chairing the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (1979). Williams was later to claim that “I did all the major vices.” But the rules of engagement have changed. It has become customary to ridicule rather than welcome the idea of a philosopher opining on the 18  Quoted in the second programme of the series on the history of the Third Programme presented on Radio 3 in 1996 by Humphrey Carpenter. 19  Williams recalled asking the programme’s philosophy producer what he wanted to achieve from a talk in which he was about to participate and being told:

Simply think that you are talking to your colleagues. What I want this to be is to give an opportunity for people who don’t move in the circles of professional philosophers to overhear philosophers talking to each other. In the introduction to an anthology celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Third Programme its unashamedly elitist controller, John Morris, stated: Many of our talks are still not only dull but difficult to comprehend without considerable knowledge of the subjects under review. This has been a deliberate policy and I am sure a right one. Any attempt to brighten up by talking down to our listeners would inevitably lead to a general lowering of intellectual standards. Besides, we should cease to obtain the services of some of the best minds of our own and other countries. John Morris ed. From the Third Programme; A Ten Years’ Anthology (1956: Nonesuch Press, London). The story of the decline and demise of the Third Programme is a complex one but it’s clear that a loss of intellectual nerve and a failure to defend what’s true and worthy about progressive elitism on the part of the higher-ups in the BBC played a part. The same lack of intellectual and ethical backbone contributed to the end of The Listener in 1991, an unapologetically highbrow yet accessible  magazine of which Berlin and his philosophical contemporaries were regular contributors. The Third Programme (and The Listener) operated on the assumption that the point of public broadcasting and debate is not merely to reflect society but to challenge it and thereby raise its self-understanding.

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great issues of the day. There is definitely some merit in being sceptical of professional philosophers pronouncing piously from their cloisters on matters of broad public concern. Indeed, such scepticism may seem more justified now than in the past since there are so few intellectuals, not to mention philosophers, who combine practical experience of public affairs with the broad intelligence of a polymath. Today the overwhelming number of contemporary public intellectuals are, first and foremost, academic specialists who may well be pre-eminent in their particular field of study but whom we have no reason to believe speak with any special authority on matters of more general intellectual or public interest.20 Besides, a more important barometer of the cerebral welfare of a society is a sufficiently large, intellectually discriminate and engaged public. Without a critical mass of informed and socially conscientious citizens, public intellectuals become superfluous and society mentally atrophied. The far greater threat facing us today is not from members of the intelligentsia who may be scholarly and clever about their specialist domain of study and relatively clueless about everything else but from the decline of an educated and progressive citizenry and the terrific ignorance and credulity of vast numbers of our society. This tendency has manifested itself most conspicuously and alarmingly in the United States of America as well as Great Britain where we have seen in the public sphere the breakdown of even a minimally shared sense of what is objectively the case. The centre is no longer holding in the ways we complacently assumed it always would. There are, of course, a multiplicity of reasons for the disturbing trends we see before us, but a major factor is the relative absence of informed, dispassionate thinking about politics and society. The good news is that we can do something about our epistemological failures and shortcomings. It is not beyond our reach to improve how we think and what we judge worth thinking about. If we do choose to try to reflect more clearly and candidly on the things that matter, we stand a better chance of making our situation better rather than letting it get worse. As one philosopher has 20  It is possible of course to underestimate today’s thinkers and idealise those of yesterday. Modern public intellectuals of the calibre of John Stuart Mill, Alexander Herzen, or John Dewey have always been thin on the ground. However, it does seem that the quality of intellectual debate about matters of public interest has declined since the start of this century. Even if we look at the matter purely from the perspective of Anglophone philosophers, it is hard to identify who are the contemporary successors of the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Elizabeth Anscombe, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Ronald Dworkin, Philippa Foot, Stuart Hampshire, Alasdair MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams and so on.

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observed recently, ‘we don’t have to accept the status quo like despondent card players who have been dealt a bad hand.’21 The following chapters are primarily concerned with discussing the views of six philosophers on five big questions. Considering these questions will prompt us to examine a range of philosophical and normative issues which in turn will end up raising doubts about the coherence of viewing philosophy as having a clearly defined method or even subject matter. Little in philosophy stays unchanged. But one thing that can be said with a degree of confidence about the subject is that its spirit is essentially curious, free and critical. This isn’t to claim of course that criticism and scrutiny are unique to philosophy. All genuinely intellectual disciplines from literature and history to biology and mathematics depend on the exercise of our critical and imaginative faculties. But what is peculiar to philosophy is its intrinsic and unquenchable scepticism. The idea that absolutely nothing or very little can be taken for granted is indispensable to philosophy. Similarly, an undogmatic, yet discriminate, open-­mindedness is the hallmark of philosophical reflection. This might explain why philosophy’s great failures throughout its history are as persistently revealing and instructive as its celebrated achievements.22 Few modern philosophers have expressed the spirit of scepticism more vividly than Descartes in the first precept of his ‘method of doubt’ which required him ‘never to accept anything as true that I did not incontrovertibly know to be so’.23 Descartes’ aim was to try to winnow out everything that he could conceivably doubt in an effort to determine if any indubitable knowledge survives. He arrived at the famous  Cogito, ergo sum. Descartes was of course at pains to emphasise in the opening pages of his Discourse on Method that philosophical doubt is a method for working out if anything is certain rather than a practical tool for ordinary, everyday life. But it is also the case that the very activity of philosophising, even about the most abstract and recondite of topics, has an effect on the person engaging in such thoughts as well as on society as a whole to the extent that the latter takes note of it.  Quassim Cassam, Vices of the Mind: from the intellectual to the political, (2019: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 187. 22  Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay (2020: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) brings out this strange and central facet of philosophy and its history. 23  René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, translated by Ian Maclean (2006, Oxford University Press, Oxford), Part 2, Section 18. 21

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Philosophy is unique in being unaccountable to anyone or anything except thought itself and, even then, the very nature of thought is not any less susceptible to philosophical scrutiny and dispute. Nothing is sacred and everything is susceptible to critical, adversarial examination once there is a philosopher in the room. This can make philosophy a self-­undermining activity and its practitioners subversive and  adversarial. Berlin describes this feature of philosophy and philosophers vividly in his essay ‘Philosophy and Government Repression’: Men of genius may be creative or destructive, may be liberating or enslaving, or both in one; it is only among philosophers that men of authentic genius are necessarily to a large degree destructive of past tradition. Great philosophers always transform, upset and destroy. […]. That is the most important point, it seems to me, about all philosophical activity – that there can be no orthodoxy, that there can in it be no methods capable of indefinite improvement […]. That is what constitutes the uniqueness of philosophy: that its whole work is, and always has been, addressed to each generation with its own set of peculiar problems, created by the particular intellectual or political or social or psychological circumstances of its own time. (SR2 88)24

Berlin’s account of what makes philosophy special has implications for the subject and its place in society. His vision provides a compelling alternative to the tendency of much contemporary professional philosophy which is characterised by an extreme form of specialisation and theoretically bland otherworldliness that runs the risk of strangling the life out of the discipline. Berlin’s conception of philosophy helps us see why the subject matters beyond the ivory towers of armchair philosophers, why we all have a vested interest in taking note of it. Of course, acknowledging philosophy’s relevance to society does not require everyone to become a full-­ time philosopher. Rather it depends on enough people recognising that philosophical reflection is a worthwhile activity that requires a minimal degree of liberty to breathe. It may seem contradictory, perverse even, to wish to preserve a reflective activity that is capable of undermining the very thing which protects it. But a moment’s thought reveals that the perception of a contradiction is more apparent than real. No society in recorded human history has existed with the sole or overriding goal of prioritising the autonomous and unbenign aspirations of philosophy. 24  A contemporary philosopher who adopts much the same view about what is unique about philosophy is Graham Priest. See his ‘What is Philosophy?’, Philosophy, Vol. 81, No. 316 (2006), 189–207.

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Countless rulers and states, on the other hand, have tried to eliminate or severely curtail freedom of thought. Those which have succeeded have tended to justify their policies on the grounds that free and independent thought jeopardises the achievement of the common good or the official destiny of the state and so forth. But what philosophy reminds us of is that the life of the mind is neither answerable to nor exhausted by the ideals and preoccupations of the state or of a particular group or wider community. There is a definite and vital sense in which the only morality of the philosopher is an unbridled commitment to the spirit of truth and truthfulness. Philosophy has its own set of concerns and goals which tend to lie beyond the direct interest of the majority of the human race, but which nonetheless embody something distinctive and infinitely precious about our humanity and the freedom it needs for its existence. As Berlin states: Certainly no society will be wholly secure, wholly safe on rocklike foundations, while philosophers are allowed to roam at large. But their suppression will kill liberty too. That is why all the enemies of freedom, like the Communists and Fascists, automatically round upon intellectuals and make them their first victims; rightly, for they are the great disseminators of those critical ideas which as a rule the great philosophers are the first to formulate. All others may be brought into conformity with the new despotism; only they, whether they want to or not, are in principle incapable of being assimilated into it. This is glory enough for any human activity. (SR 95)

Of course, not all individuals who demonstrate independence of thought and find themselves at an angle with the world regard themselves as philosophical in the formal sense of that term. Nor do all philosophers turn out to be socially agreeable or morally decent. Intellectual virtues do not presuppose or entail moral virtues or vice versa and the same applies with regard to intellectual and moral vices. But while we don’t have to accept the Socratic doctrine that knowledge is virtue, we can and should recognise that knowledge and virtue are not unrelated and do occasionally and non-accidentally coincide. One of the more striking personifications of modern intellectual and moral virtue is Huckleberry Finn, and no scene in Twain’s great novel – the book that Ernest Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from – illustrates it more poignantly than when Huck philosophises in his own distinctive and undeniably authentic way about what he should do about the runaway slave, Jim. After much self-­ dialogue and self-torment, he writes a letter to the conventionally moralistic Miss Watson informing her of Jim’s whereabouts and then says to himself:

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I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking – thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” – and tore it up.25

25  Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, chapter 31. Those who may narrowly claim that the uncompromisingly critical and self-critical Huckleberry Finn cannot be credibly described as a philosopher can hardly deny that he thought philosophically at least once. Moreover, those who are prepared to view Huckleberry Finn as a philosopher – those who aren’t have a view of philosophy that is alien to mine – are also likely to see that he is not the kind of philosopher who leaves his philosophy in the library. In one of the finest essays on Isaiah Berlin, Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser capture Berlin’s emphasis on the broad reach and relevance of philosophy to our lives:

Berlin […] is an imaginative philosopher and historian of ideas who has repeatedly reminded us not to underestimate the influence of abstract ideas in human affairs, however harmless such ideas may appear when detached from their historical settings and microscopically analysed by philosophers. He has reminded us that we cannot live without explaining the world to ourselves; that such explanations always rest on a conception of what is and what can be; that whether we know it or not, insofar as we care about ideas at all, we are all participants in debates once familiar only to coteries of intellectuals. Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser ‘The Questions of Isaiah Berlin’ and ‘The Choices of Isaiah Berlin’, originally published in the New York Review of Books March 6 and March 20, 1980 respectively and republished as one essay in Jonathan Lieberson Varieties (1988: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, New York), 112.

CHAPTER 2

Berlin and A. J. Ayer on Morality

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

The question regarding the objectivity of morality is one of those philosophical topics that appears as fundamental as it is intractable. It satisfies at least two of the criteria that are commonly thought to define a genuinely philosophical question – it is deeply meaningful yet stubbornly insoluble. But the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (LTL) in 1936 made the astonishing claim that the question is demonstrably and conclusively answerable.1 In that best-selling book its author argued in a characteristically direct and pugnacious  manner that there is nothing objective about morality and to claim that there is reflects a belief that is provably false as well as transparently meaningless. The spellbinding clarity, precision and  eloquence of Ayer’s argument against moral realism ensured that LTL became an instant succès de scandale and not exclusively within the ivory-towers of academic philosophers. The uncompromising repudiation of the age-old belief in the objectivity of morality formed part of Ayer’s broader intellectual agenda of seeking to show that most, if not all, of the recalcitrant questions of traditional 1  A.  J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (1936: Gollancz, London). Hereafter referred to as LTL.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6_2

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philosophy could be laid to belated and permanent rest. Ayer boldly announces his self-appointed role as philosophy’s undertaker in the opening paragraph of LTL: The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery. (LTL 33)

According to Ayer, the ‘traditional disputes of philosophers’ derive largely from philosophy’s entanglement with metaphysics and the wanton gibberish that stems from this unholy alliance. Ayer was keen to exorcise these endlessly unanswered questions and preoccupations from the philosophical agenda. Chief among them is the illusion that the business of philosophy is to discover the weird and wonderful truths that in some way transcend science and common sense. In the second paragraph of the book he declares his commitment to disabusing philosophy of its metaphysically fuelled deformities: We may begin by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense … One way of attacking the metaphysician who claimed to have [this] knowledge … would be to inquire into what premises his proposition was deduced. Must he not begin, as other men do, with the evidence of his sense? ... [Yet] surely, from empirical premises nothing … super-empirical can legitimately be inferred? (LTL 13)

Ayer’s early masterpiece betrays the hallmark of the Vienna Circle, a school of thought committed to putting philosophy on a steadfastly naturalistic footing and, more generally, to improving society on a reliably secular, scientific basis. As Berlin observes, the logical positivists of the 1920s and 1930s resembled the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, believing themselves ‘to be engaged on the task of dissipating a state of darkness largely maintained by stubborn obscurantists with a vested interest in the prevailing ignorance’ (CC2 308).2 Ayer’s  From Berlin’s review of Julius Weinberg, The Examination of Logical Positivism, in Criterion 17 (1937), 174–82; reprinted in CC2, 305–15. 2

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tutor and chief intellectual sponsor in Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, had convinced his star pupil to visit the Austrian capital to discover at first-hand what its leading philosophical lights were up to. Ayer, who was already familiar with the Humean and Russellian elements of the school’s version of logical empiricism, exploited this opportunity with typical gusto. After a mere four months in the company of such thinkers as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath during the first half of 1933, Ayer felt confident that he had mastered enough of what he needed to know about the more technical aspects of their empirical outlook to return to Oxford and zealously spread the logical positivist word. For the young and still impressionable Ayer, logical positivism amounted to the discovery of the holy grail of philosophy. And his failure to secure a permanent appointment in Oxford made him even more determined to produce a book that would make his reputation as a philosopher of note as well as ruffle the feathers of the academic establishment, especially those of his own ultra-­conservative college of Christ Church. In the Preface to LTL, he acknowledged his debt to both Ryle and Berlin ‘who have discussed with me every point in the argument of this treatise, and made many valuable suggestions, although they both disagree with much of what I assert.’ As we shall see, Berlin’s disagreement with LTL was persistent and deep even if he was sympathetic to the anti-metaphysical tone of Ayer’s book. Berlin admired the Enlightenment strain that informed the logical positivist outlook both in its rejection of the metaphysical excesses of much of the philosophical tradition and, more positively, in its unstinting commitment to the methods and findings of reason and empiricism. It’s likely he would have felt that, at its best, logical empiricism came close to fulfilling Russell’s ideal of analytic philosophy: ‘cold steel in the hand of passion.’3 But Berlin was profoundly unsympathetic to its reductive and scientistic mindset which insisted  that philosophy is essentially a technique and one that must be exclusively faithful to the dictates of natural science.

The Emotive Theory of Morality The claim that ethics is neither true nor false but instead a purely emotive affair was not the brainchild of Ayer. Emotivism or moral subjectivism had been around in one guise or another since the publication of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and, before that, most famously among the ancient Greek sophists. But what made Ayer’s version of it 3

 Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996: Jonathan Cape, London), 262.

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so immediately attractive is that he expressed it in peerlessly limpid and punchy prose. One of the many virtues of LTL, particularly the notorious chapter VI which contains Ayer’s assault on metaphysics and ethics, is its suggestion that a dense and seemingly permanent mist has suddenly lifted with the result that we are now able to see a familiar but hitherto barely understood phenomenon for the first time under the clear, unforgiving light of day. He leaves us with the empowering impression that a problem which had seemed insoluble had been finally settled in a way that every sensible person could understand and endorse. The sense of intellectual exhilaration that derives from a book that is so felicitously accessible about a big and difficult question of human interest is one that many of us experience while reading LTL. Ayer’s theory of emotivism goes as follows. It puts forward an account of value in which our moral, aesthetic and religious beliefs and motives are defined as emotional desires beyond the pale of reason. Exhortations such as ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ as well as more positive ones like ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ are interpreted as expressions of negative and positive emotional evincements designed mostly to evoke similar attitudes in others. To claim, for example, that it is morally wrong to commit adultery or that it is morally right to honour the wishes of the Church is to engage in a purely boo/hooray emotional ejaculation. Calling things morally good or bad merely magnifies our positive or negative feelings about them but, crucially, neither endows them, nor demonstrates that they are already endowed, with some objective cognitive content or meaning. The central plank of Ayer’s emotivism, therefore, is that all forms of evaluative discourse, including that of morals and religion, are cognition-­ free through-and-through. The value of things and our reasons for liking or disliking them reside in our own subjective and arbitrary desires not in the actual, objective world nor in the realm of rationality. What leads Ayer to view morals as mere expressions of feelings? And what exactly does it mean to assert that moral judgments and discourse do not fall within the cognitive or rational sphere of true and false propositions? The answer to both questions lies in his distinctively positivist understanding of what makes a proposition a genuinely meaningful statement. According to Ayer, the only kinds of meaningful propositions, apart from analytic truths which are tautologous, are those that can be verified or falsified by sensory experience. Unless a particular proposition is capable, in practice or in theory, of being shown to be empirically true

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or false, it belongs to the realm of the cognitively meaningless.4 Ayer enlisted the notorious verification principle – that only propositions susceptible to verification by the senses or by controlled observation could be defined as strictly meaningful – to ground his theory that value judgements are incapable of being true in any objective or evidence-based sense of that term. And just to be clear from the outset, Ayer’s claim is not that moral thought and action are unintelligible or unimportant, but that they lie outside the realm of empirical verification and rational discourse. His aim is to demystify and pragmatise rather than trivialise and condemn morals and moral (and immoral) behaviour. But there is no denying that where Wittgenstein’s closing line of the Tractatus  – ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ – at least left open the possibility that nonsensical statements might also qualify as ineffable truths, Ayer’s view of evaluative discourse shut the door firmly and loudly to any such possibility.5 Ayer managed to avoid the trap of throwing the logical baby out with the evaluative (and metaphysical) bathwater. He claimed that value statements are not just meaningless on account of being empirically untestable but because they do not qualify as a priori truths either. For him, factual propositions as well as formal, a priori propositions such as the truths of logic and mathematics (which he considered non-trivial tautologies) are the only types of non-empirical statements that are capable of satisfying the status of cognitively meaningful statements. Once we recognise what differentiates genuinely meaningful propositions from strictly meaningless ones, he argues, the following conclusion becomes irresistible: We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgements. It is not because they have an “absolute” validity which is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no sense in asking whether what it says is 4  The truth of analytic truths, such as ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ or ‘2 + 3 = 5’ consists in the fact that the meaning of the second term (‘unmarried’ and ‘5’) is, by definition, contained in the meaning of the first terms ‘bachelors’ and ‘2 + 3’), so their truth tells us about the relationship between concepts but doesn’t disclose anything substantive about the world. 5  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.  F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961: Routledge, London) 7. Wittgenstein makes the following remark about the nature and possibility of such ineffable truths: ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.’ (6.522).

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true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth or falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable – because they do not express genuine propositions. (LTL 108–9)

There is a sense in which Ayer fulfils a common expectation that many of us have of professional philosophers. The laity typically expect philosophers to provide us with a clear and definitive theory of what something like morality means and requires. Ayer’s theory provides such an answer even if it cannot tell us what most of us really want to know, namely, is there, objectively speaking, a morally good way to live. His account of ethical discourse tells us, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of impact, that since the difference between right and wrong, good and bad is an emotive matter rather than a cognitive one, the traditional and still powerful assumption that there exist objective and universally applicable moral truths is a myth. It isn’t so much that all evaluative judgements are locked in endless dispute but that they are strictly meaningless or, as the logical positivists were disposed to labelling them ‘vaporous nonsense’. It is hardly surprising that the more irreverent and iconoclastic aspects of Ayer’s emotivism brought controversy and contempt from conservative academic circles; one of the more notorious instances included the Master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay, throwing LTL out the window into Broad Street after being asked by his students to discuss it.6 However, once we adopt Ayer’s way of looking at ethics, a number of hitherto  puzzling  phenomena seem to make a lot more sense. Chief among these is the persistence of moral and political disagreement. Emotivism has the effect of explaining far more readily why there exists such a rich and pervasive diversity of ethical and political attitudes. It also lends itself to grasping the fact of cultural relativism. The existence of different cultures with radically different moral codes and practices is rendered more readily explicable in terms of the impact of the environment on people’s moral motivations and attitudes. The brute sociological fact of ethical disagreement and cultural heterogeneity is difficult to square with the conviction that there really exists some absolute morality out there which more defensible moral norms and practices of particular 6

 See Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life (1999: Chatto & Windus, London), 124.

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individuals and/or societies are somehow meant to be mirroring. Our failure to track the objective moral fabric of the world, to perceive and follow the moral noumena, is more easily explained by the fact that no such moral universe or ‘ontologically queer’ moral entities exist.7 Furthermore, the idea that morality is a matter of ultimately individual, subjective taste also lends itself to the agreeably liberal political conviction that moral disagreement and cultural diversity ought to be accommodated on the grounds that there exists no cognitively supreme moral code or uniquely right way of life to which all rational agents should follow – de gustibus non est disputandum (In matters of taste, there can be no disputes). Hence, the still popular view that the recognition of emotivism supports the affirmation of liberal toleration and individual freedom as well as a liberating theory of moral permissiveness. It’s worth remarking en passant that Ayer was a consistently active and publicly engaged advocate of liberal humanism; he succeeded Julian Huxley as President of the British Humanist Association in 1965 and was also appointed President of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, which was created to educate the public about homosexuality and to lead the liberal reform of legislation in the wake of the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report: while chairing the society he remarked ‘as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest.’ However, towards the end of his life, which happened to coincide with the heyday of Thatcherism and its baleful effects on higher education, Ayer wrote ‘It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.’8

Berlin’s Pluralist Theory of Morality: Part One The scholar and satirist, H. L. Mencken, stated that ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.’9 The emotive theory of morality advocated by Ayer in his youthful masterpiece fits Mencken’s description all too well. And one of the best ways of

 See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977: Pelican, London).  A. J. Ayer, Letter to the Times, 12 August 1986. 9  H.L. Mencken, ‘The Divine Afflatus’ in A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writings (1982 ed.: Vintage, New York), 443. 7 8

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exposing its shortcomings is by familiarising ourselves with Berlin’s more astute and serious treatment of morality. A good way grasping Berlin’s understanding of ethics is via his treatment of the phenomenon of moral disagreement. In contrast to Ayer, Berlin’s diagnosis of moral conflict invites us to interpret human values and ideals non-subjectively. One of the ways he tries to bring out the objectivity of morals is by highlighting the difference between the diversity of preferences that are based on purely subjective taste and ethical dilemmas which appear to be non-subjectively grounded.10 The type of example he gives is the familiar, if hackneyed, one of the difference between choosing between champagne and coffee and the celebrated Sartrean choice of minding one’s mother in a time of war or following the call of one’s country against an undeniably evil and encroaching foe. Someone who prefers the taste of champagne over that of coffee typically does so because they happen to like the flavour of the former over the latter: their preference is based on nothing more nor less than the particular taste sensation they happen to experience with champagne. They might decide, of course, to cease consuming champagne if, for example, it turned out that it was having harmful effects on their health or if they discovered that that champagne producers  pay  their staff less than the  minimum wage. But if for the purposes of argument we are permitted to discount such extraneous factors, it is likely that someone who has a preference for champagne today will continue to have the same preference tomorrow and that their acting on this preference is founded on nothing more than the irreducible arbitrariness of their personal, anatomically-based taste sensation. It would therefore be as absurd as it would be unnecessary to argue that a preference for champagne is more rational than a preference for coffee. Rationality doesn’t enter the equation in a case of this kind for the simple reason that rationality is thought to have nothing to do with an individual’s partiality to champagne. In short, this kind of random subjective taste and inclination is not of intrinsic relevance to cognitive investigation. Now the question we are principally concerned with is, do our moral feelings and convictions have the same epistemological character as those of our subjective tastes about something as comparatively trivial as 10  Particularly relevant essays and passages include ‘The Rationality of Value Judgments’ (CC2 315–17), ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, ‘Reply to Robert Kocis’ and ‘Reply to Ronald H. McKinney’ in (CTH2, 1–20, 303–18).

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champagne or coffee? Our ordinary pre-theoretical intuitions might suggest that there is a large and unbridgeable difference between the two and that anyone who argues otherwise is either severely ethically myopic or in some way wildly idiosyncratic. But we must try to suspend for the time being our default settings on this matter and open ourselves to the possibility that our ordinary, perhaps absolutist-minded, picture of morality might be mistaken, that it may well consist of an inflated and ultimately untenable impression of what morality actually is. Berlin’s allusion to the classic Sartrean dilemma between filial duty and patriotism focuses our minds on what, if anything, differentiates the arena of the personal subjective taste, such as our preference for champagne over coffee, from the domain of morality and moral values. Philosophers are fond of using such seemingly trivial examples for the entirely untrivial reason that they are trying to show that if our moral attitudes are epistemologically indistinguishable in the relevant sense from our subjective tastes about something as relatively trifling as champagne or coffee then the case for moral objectivity looks hopeless. The first point that Berlin insists on making is that our intuition that a clear and compelling asymmetry exists between the phenomenon of purely subjective taste and that of moral experience is not necessarily unwarranted: for there is something jarringly stupid about the very idea of trying to convince someone that their preference for champagne is rationally inferior (or superior) to a penchant for coffee. Whereas it is far from obvious that debating the pros and cons of caring for one’s mother or defending one’s fatherland is either meaningless or pointless. But can the latter debate lend itself to rational discussion and adjudication, or must it finally come down to an emotionally charged affair the resolution of which has nothing to do with truth and rationality and everything to do with contingent, if intensely felt, visceral reactions and preferences. In other words, one person may decide that minding one’s vulnerable mother is the best course of action whereas another person could feel that fighting for his country against a cruel and hostile enemy is the morally right decision for him. So it seems all that relevantly differentiates the moral scenario from the non-moral scenario is the gravity and intensity of our emotional preferences. Emotivism does not deny that morals are emotionally and socially more important to human beings than many of their other subjective desires and beliefs. Rather it is simply arguing that our evaluative talk is devoid of cognitive meaning. We seem to be left therefore with the fundamental and insurmountable challenge that there is no truth of the matter

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in either type of scenario, that there is no sense in which our moral decisions can be viewed as tracking some external and vindicatory moral reality, just as our non-moral subjective preferences for champagne or coffee are entirely bereft of metaphysical and epistemological meaning and significance. Appealing to reason in an effort to prove that one’s family or friend comes before one’s country or vice versa is as footling and futile as seeking to prove that champagne is objectively superior to coffee. So the intuitive argument from moral conflict against emotivism is hardly decisive.  My hunch is that there are at least three reasons why LTL touched a chord with both philosophers and the general public. The first is undoubtedly connected with the ascendency of the positivist picture of the world, with its plausible enough doctrine that there exists a clear and unbridgeable gap between facts and values. Ayer offered a version of this originally Humean idea that simplified and then amplified the seemingly irrefutable notion that facts are uncontroversially testable and objective whereas values are unverifiable and subjective. Hence, moral statements are in the business of describing the world, rather they express our attitudes to it. Implicit in this viewpoint is a metaphysical picture that there couldn’t be any ethical predicament in the world without us happening to have certain subjectivist and, ultimately, arbitrary feelings and attitudes about our situation. The second reason is no doubt due to its winning simplicity: to be told that morality is an emotive matter provides a nice, neat explanation of the persistence of deep and widespread ethical dispute: we disagree about our moral views just as we disagree about our religious and aesthetic views for the simple and pivotal reason that there is nothing objective to agree upon in any of these spheres of human discourse. Ayer gives us every reason to give up the ghost of moral objectivism and by implication to resist our habit of believing that ethics must possess some cognitive moral foundation to warrant our allegiance to it. And another factor must surely have been its liberating subversiveness: it offered a solution to morality by deflating its status. After reading Ayer, the seemingly intractable and portentous philosophical questions of ethics seem to  vanish overnight – the idea that morality is at heart objective emerges as an influential fiction rather than a philosophical truth. LTL managed to articulate logical positivism in a way that proved as convincing as it is clear. In this respect, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the lucidity, concision and elegance of Ayer’s prose in explaining the power and reception of his bestseller.

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But once we consider the shaky foundations on which Ayer’s emotivism rests, it begins to lose its appeal. Its most celebrated weakness is that the (in)famous verification principle, the lynchpin upon which his argument rests, suffers from the very flaw of which he impugns all forms of normative and metaphysical discourse: since there is no way of empirically verifying the principle of verification and since it does not qualify as an analytic truth, it would seem that the principle itself falls on its own empirical sword. This knock-down argument may be valid but it doesn’t really engage with the more substantial aspect of Ayer’s emotivism. In this respect, it resembles the one-line rebuttal of relativism that it is self-­ contradictory to argue for one point of view (i.e. relativism) while simultaneously claiming that no viewpoint is more justified than any other. If such clean and quick refutations were as conclusive and convincing as they appear to be then the anti-cognitivist tide would have vanished long ago. The reason it hasn’t is because it retains a cogency that sidesteps its logical self-contradiction.11 The more popular and enduring appeal of Ayer’s emotivism derives from the dichotomy between facts and values upon which it is based. And it is this feature of Ayer’s ethical non-cognitivism on which we must now focus.

Facts and Values The sense that there is a clear and absolute difference between a fact and a value seems as obvious as day follows night. Saying, for example, that there are more poor people in the world than rich people is a different kind of statement than saying that economic inequality is morally deplorable or unjustified. Similarly, the claim that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia provides the historical setting of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is different in kind from the assertion that his epic novel must be counted among the greatest works of Western literature. Moreover, the common and strongly-­ held belief that there is a hard and fast distinction between factual statements and value judgments is almost invariably accompanied by the equally widespread binary thought that facts are absolutely uncontroversial and objective properties about the world whereas values are 11  There is also the point that in his 1946 edition of LTL Ayer argues that the force of his emotive theory of ethics is not reliant on logical positivism. It is worth emphasising too that there are problems with Ayer’s verification principle besides its paradoxical nature as Michael Williams shows in his essay, ‘The elimination of metaphysics’, in Graham MacDonald and Crispin Wright eds., Fact, Science and Morality (1987: Blackwell, Oxford).

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inherently contested and subjective projections. The certainty and virtual universality of our belief in a fact/value dichotomy has reached a point at which it has become what one notable philosopher has aptly called ‘a cultural institution’ – by which he meant that the fact-value dichotomy is most likely to continue being part of the cultural bloodstream for the time being ‘regardless of what philosophers may say about it, and regardless of whether or not the received answer is right.’12 Thus, the deflationary explosiveness of Ayer’s account of the cognitive status of our moral beliefs fell on fertile ground. By the time LTL was published the public had already imbibed the increasingly scientific outlook of the age, with its emphasis on the cult of the fact and the associated subjectivity of vast swathes of human thought that purportedly fell beyond the reach and relevance of truth and reason. Initially, therefore, the appeal of emotivism can seem irresistible. Scientific facts strike us as true in a way that moral, aesthetic and religious assumptions and doctrines appear incapable of being true. It seems that there is no fact of the matter about whether things are good or bad, right or wrong, whereas there does appear to be a real, uncontroversial fact of the matter in the case of the methods and results of science and naturalistically-­derived common sense. Furthermore, Ayer’s emotive theory of morality offers a prima facie convincing account of what lies behind our moral talk and how we can better make sense of morality from a positivist perspective: morality is essentially an emotional affair which is all about projecting and arousing our moral feelings and preferences. In common with religious, aesthetic and metaphysically-inspired beliefs, our moral opinions are, from a cognitive perspective, strictly nonsense: they are both empirically untestable and necessarily devoid of rational content, since they all belong to a realm of human thought and conduct that resists the inductive and deductive methods of the natural and exact sciences. Hume expressed the implications of this viewpoint with unsentimental relish in his Treatise on Human Nature: Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain ­passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in 12  Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (1981: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 127.

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the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. (Bk1, Section 1)

It is now time to raise some doubts about emotivism and the positivist standpoint from which it springs. There are at least two serious difficulties with Ayer’s position. The first is more familiar than the second. It centres on the rather humdrum observation that many of our most basic concepts contain both descriptive and evaluative elements which cannot be separated without distorting the meaning and implications of the concepts themselves. Emotivism maintains much of its superficial plausibility by restricting its deflationary treatment of morality to thin evaluative concepts such as right and wrong, good and bad: it is easier to show there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values or, alternatively, between an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’ if, for example, one limits the discussion to highlighting the contrast between such statements or judgments as ‘John has blue eyes ‘ and ‘What John did was wrong’ or ‘Mary visited her parents for Christmas’ and ‘Mary felt morally obliged to visit her parents for Christmas’. But things get more complicated and problematic when we switch our focus to less ethically thin and bleached concepts such as courage, cowardice, mercy, cruelty, sincerity, deception, compassion, injustice, equality, misanthropy and so on. It is not just that it’s unclear how one would begin to disentangle the normative from the descriptive elements in each of these concepts. There is the more profound problem that it is far from obvious that even trying to separate these elements would make any coherent sense at all.. And the challenge of formulating a value-free account of a normatively loaded idea is not restricted to morally thick concepts. The epistemological concepts of truth, objectivity, and rationality are value-laden too: we believe that our beliefs are better if they are true rather than false, objective rather than arbitrary, rational rather than irrational and these epistemological beliefs cannot be characterised as value-neutral. So the positivist enterprise of generating a normatively neutral theory of reason and ethics is theoretically compromised from the start and leads itself into all kinds of methodological and conceptual culs de sac and self-contradictions. A less obvious but related problem with emotivism and the positivism from which it typically originates rests on the knotty matter of the place of truth and knowledge in ethics. Emotivism loads the dice in favour of moral non-cognitivism by oversimplifying and then distorting the epistemological nature of ethics. One way of identifying the oversimplification is

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by introducing a distinction between knowledge contrasted with error and knowledge contrasted with ignorance.13 When knowledge is contrasted with error, a proposition is either true or false absolutely whereas when knowledge is contrasted with ignorance, a proposition can be more or less true since knowledge is interpreted in scalar terms. Emotivism operates on the basis that knowledge only takes the first form, namely, that it contrasts with error. It secures much of its immediate credibility and appeal by showing that the exact and empirical sciences fulfil its criterion of knowledge in a way that morality and other value-laden enquiries don’t and can’t. So, for example, there exist true and demonstrable answers to such non-evaluative questions as ‘What is the square root of 9?’ and ‘On what island was Napoleon born?’ in a way that that we do not appear to have uniquely correct and provable answers to such moral questions  as ‘How ought I to live my life?’ or ‘Is liberty better than equality?’. Moreover, we have available clear and reliable methods of deduction and induction that enable us to answer mathematical and empirical questions in a way that we don’t appear to have similar-type rational methods in respect of evaluative questions. But the landscape changes radically when we broaden our perspective and apply the second, non-binary conception of knowledge. Knowledge contrasted with ignorance makes room for knowledge-­ claims that do not need to be uniquely and entirely right since it permits the possibility of answers that are more or less valid (or invalid) rather than absolutely and completely right or wrong. The relevance of this scalar concept of truth is of course applicable to ethical and non-ethical matters: for example, material objects can be more or less solid and more or less warm just as people can be more or less kind and more or less selfish. Similarly, we can rationally agree that there may be better and worse ways of responding to an ethical dilemma without having to accept that it must either have a uniquely true and right solution or be irreducibly subjective.

13  I am indebted to Dorothy Walsh’s Literature and Knowledge (1969: Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn) for introducing me to this deceptively simple yet arresting distinction. Walsh’s distinction does not provide a knockdown argument against moral nihilism or scepticism, but it does manage to unfreeze a debate that has a habit of being chronically restrictive and repetitive. It works more as a suggestive analogy rather than a robust theory. A more theoretically robust treatment of truth that is sympathetic to the general pluralistic position I am advocating here is found in the work of Michael P. Lynch; see his Truth as One and Many (2011: Oxford University Press, Oxford) in which he argues in favour of a theory of truth that accommodates a plurality of different kinds of truth.

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The advantage of having this dual conception of knowledge is that it allows us to more readily accommodate the undeniable and crucial differences between science and ethics. Emotivism fails to do justice to the reality of our moral experience by arguing that the domain of values is cognitively empty. For if the realm of moral thought and action really is non-cognitive, as emotivism supposes, then each of us is effectively correcting our own homework when we are asked to explain and justify our moral beliefs and decisions. The effort to purge morality of its rational pretensions violates something deep and pervasive about our moral understanding and experience. That seems straightforwardly suspect. When we are faced with moral questions, we intuitively believe that, while they may not have matchlessly right and binding answers, that there are, nonetheless, objectively better and worse answers to them. We hold this conviction because we believe it is faithful to the reality of our ethical experience, and crucially, we typically deny that our most basic moral beliefs are merely expressions of our subjectively idiosyncratic desires or are exhausted by the culture we happen to belong to. For example, we wouldn’t describe an individual who tortures children for fun or a society that exterminates people who happen to be deaf, dumb or blind as having mildly eccentric tastes. Moreover, the possibility that we might happen upon a society which unanimously believed that such forms of cruelty and extermination was perfectly alright would not sway our own conviction that such conduct is morally indefensible and objectively wrong. But working out how we might go about producing an objective justification of such a strongly-­ held belief is more complicated than it may appear.

Berlin’s Pluralist Theory of Morality: Part Two We need to get deeper under the surface of Berlin’s understanding of moral disagreement to determine if his metaethical value pluralism offers a more philosophically credible picture of ethical thought and experience than Ayer’s emotivism. It might be helpful, therefore, if we begin by briefly recapitulating Ayer’s account of moral conflict before comparing and contrasting it with Berlin’s view of the same phenomenon. The following passage encapsulates Ayer’s view of moral disagreement: Another man may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that he may not have the same feelings about stealing as I have, and he

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may quarrel with me on account of my moral sentiments. But he cannot, strictly speaking, contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement, not even a statement about my own state of mind. I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments. And the man who is ostensibly contradicting me is merely expressing his moral sentiments. So that there is plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is asserting a genuine proposition. (LTL 110–11)

According to Ayer, therefore, genuine moral disagreement is an illusion since neither party in a so-called moral disagreement is or could be contradicting each other. Their moral views are expressions of pure individual feeling rather than genuine propositions capable of being measured and verified as true or false. So given that there is no point in asking which of the parties ‘is in the right’, it follows that it is also mistaken to think that they are engaged in a real and rationally resolvable disagreement. For Berlin the phenomenon of enduring  moral conflict offers more proof than non-proof of the non-subjectivity of ethical experience. While Berlin tends to build the case for the objectivity of ethics through apt and concrete examples rather than formally abstract and disembodied argument, he still manages to situate his own distinctive approach in a way that is recognisable to the established philosophical debate regarding the reality or otherwise of ethics. This is exemplified most effectively in his magisterial essay on the thought of the Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli. He conveys the crux of his interpretation of Machiavelli’s originality concisely in a letter from 1970: My thesis is indeed that Machiavelli was virtually the first person to declare (without doing so explicitly) that there were two incompatible moralities – the Christian and what he represented as the Graeco-Roman – and that not only rulers, but presumably citizens too, had to choose between them, for they were conceptually incompatible, not merely unrealisable [together] in practice. He thought, as you know, that one could restore the past – that the Roman republic could be restored with enough will, energy, resources. As for whether a Christian way of life could be realised, he, it seems to me, neither knew nor cared, but, I suspect, thought this quite impractical, given human nature as it must unalterably be. So my conclusion was that Croce

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was wrong in saying that Machiavelli divided politics from morals, for what he divided was one moral world from another – not at all the same thing.14

Machiavelli’s novelty, argues Berlin, lay in exploding avant la parole the highly influential monist myth – which enjoyed the status of an inviolable universal truth – that all genuine ethical values and human ideals are compatible in theory, if not in practice. The Florentine’s extreme and unblushing juxtaposition of the political and secular virtues of ancient Rome and the personal and pious virtues of Christianity, together with his then famously shocking advice that a prince could not achieve the ideals of honour, glory and fame without violating the dictates of conventional morality, planted ‘a permanent question mark in the path of posterity’ which: stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that this happens not merely in exceptional circumstances, as result of abnormality or accident or error – the clash of Antigone and Creon or the story of Tristan – but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation. (AC2 94)

The chief lesson that Berlin drew from what he regarded as Machiavelli’s inadvertent destruction of moral monism, of the ruling assumption that objective moral values and goals are finally harmonious, is to have prompted awareness: of the necessity of having to make agonising choices between incompatible alternatives in public and in private life (for the two could not, it became obvious, be genuinely kept distinct). His achievement is of the first order, if only because the dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light (it remains unsolved, but we have learnt to live with it). Men had, no doubt, in practice, often enough experienced the conflict which Machiavelli made explicit. He converted its expression from a paradox into something approaching a commonplace. (AC2 99)

Berlin’s discovery of Machiavelli’s true originality, that a virtuouso ruler needs to be admirably immoral, became the occasion of his own 14  Letter from Isaiah Berlin to Hayme Marantz, 28 May 1970: supplementary letters to Flourishing 1960–75, published at https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/catalogues. bib.255(S1). Berlin’s essay, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’ is published in AC2, 33–100.

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philosophical epiphany. He came to the realisation that Machiavelli’s implicit moral dualism, namely, that the moral commitments and duties of the responsible ruler conflict with the commitments and obligations of the prevailing Christian morality, represented the tip of a pluralist moral iceberg.15 The irreconcilable conflict between political and private morality which The Prince vividly and unceremoniously uncovers is, Berlin argued, symptomatic of a much deeper and more widespread phenomenon of moral heterogeneity and conflict that defines the human condition. Berlin labels this phenomenon pluralism. Value or moral pluralism, as it now tends to be called, became Berlin’s master idea. It is composed of a number of separate but related facets. These include the radical claim that it is not simply our beliefs about human values and ideals but the values and ideals themselves that are unavoidably plural and conflicting. Moral goods are not compatible in principle or in practice: for example, liberty is not just distinct from equality, justice or compassion but is irreducibly different from and frequently in unavoidable conflict with them. You can’t have everything: ‘freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep’ (L 38). Berlin’s is a deep as distinct from a surface pluralism. In addition, Berlin argues that the inescapable diversity among and antinomy between various moral ends are a pervasive rather than exceptional feature of human life; cases of moral conflict are not the exceptions that prove the rule but a common and ineliminable feature of our ordinary, lived lives. And the final main element of his moral pluralism is the staunch denial that there exists some absolute and universal moral barometer that allows us to objectively measure and rank human values and ideals and thereby referee and resolve moral disagreement. Berlin’s brand of value pluralism amounts to an uncompromising affirmation of the groundlessness of moral monism as well as a  radical  rejection of the coherence of human perfectibility. 15  It is unclear to what extent, if any, the philosophical community were influenced by Berlin’s essay on Machiavelli but it remains the case that in the years following its publication the following eminent thinkers produced work that shows a remarkable affinity with several of its central claims. See in particular the papers by Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams and Stuart Hampshire in Stuart Hampshire ed. Public and Private Morality (1978: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). I discuss at greater length the separate question of the historical plausibility of Berlin’s account of Machiavelli’s originality and, more fundamentally, of value pluralism, in my book The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury, London), 65–78 and 88–96. Chapter 4 of this book also revisits the matter from a more robustly historical perspective.

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One of the more notable merits of Berlin’s critique of moral monism is that it shows it’s not merely a philosopher’s fiction. The overlap between the orthodox philosophical view of morality and our normal, everyday understanding of moral thinking and conduct is greater than it might at first appear. The similarity between the two perspectives is manifest in their view of moral disagreement. Most of us, philosophers or otherwise, intuitively believe that there is or must be a single, right decision to be made in the face of a genuine ethical dilemma, that, in the final analysis, there is a correct choice to be made in relation to a conflict between, for example, justice and compassion or, less abstractly, the call of patriotism and the duty to one’s family or friend. In other words, the idea that there is an objectively right way of resolving such first-person dilemmas is both philosophically and phenomenologically powerful. Moreover, there exists a deeply-held sense that unless there is a uniquely right answer to moral questions, then morality loses its meaning and becomes an essentially random affair. Berlin’s various writings help us to see that many of the most influential world views that have contributed to the course of human history have at their core a conviction that human affairs are accountable to some all-encompassing monistic moral outlook, furnished, if not by God, then by some universal and objective source, such as human nature or the pre-ordained destiny of human history. His work also offers a powerful testimony to the enormous and often lethal impact that such monistic ideologies, both religious or secular, have had on people’s lives, especially in the twentieth century which Berlin described as ‘the worst century we’ve ever had’.16 At first sight, one might argue that there is little of real philosophical substance to differentiate Ayer’s emotivism from Berlin’s moral pluralism. After all, a fundamental and inviolable tenet of moral objectivism is that all forms of moral conflict are resolvable, that there is a uniquely and objectively superior answer to every ethical question or dilemma. Surely, therefore, Berlin’s pluralist view of morality is at bottom a species of moral subjectivism. The key to understanding why Berlin’s value pluralism does not amount to a form of moral subjectivism in disguise resides in two fundamental and related claims: the first is that moral monism does not exhaust the sphere of moral objectivity, and the second is that the unavoidability of moral disagreement is not necessarily incompatible with moral 16   Quoted in Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin; A Life (1998: Chatto & Windus, London), 301.

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cognitivism or, at least, a weak version of it. Each of these unorthodox claims needs unpacking. The potent myth that moral monism has exclusive ownership rights over moral objectivity is an enduring and powerful one. Value pluralism subverts this traditional and still influential consensus by arguing that the notion of moral objectivity does not require moral uniformity and agreement. Berlin argues that it is coherent and justified to retain a belief in a qualified form of moral objectivism without having to accept that, ultimately, there is or must be a uniquely right answer to every moral question. Contra moral absolutism, he argues that it is not a failure of reason but a proper recognition of our concrete, palpable experience of moral conflict that posits the objective plurality of ethical values and human ends. And contra moral emotivism, Berlin contends that by characterising our moral values and ideals as non-cognitive we end up emptying them of their real and intended meaning and significance. Rather surprisingly, Berlin’s position is a heterodox one in the context of the Western tradition of moral speculation, occupying a no-man’s land between the dominant standpoints of moral monism (and absolutism) and moral subjectivism (and relativism). Let’s pause here for a moment to consider the distinctive mode of Berlin’s opposition to the predominantly no-conflict view of moral objectivism. As intimated already, it does not proceed by identifying internal inconsistencies or contradictions in rival moral theories or, more positively, by constructing its own defence of value pluralism on the basis of a formal, hyper-rationalistic moral theory, the type of ethical theory critiqued in Iris Murdoch’s celebrated paper ‘Against Dryness’ (1961). On the contrary, Berlin’s approach is fundamentally anthropological and phenomenological in the sense that it bases its argument on the messy reality  of everyday human experience. His moral and political reflections are rooted in the specific world of actual human life rather than the free-floating, contextless principles and precepts of so much contemporary moral and political theory. In this respect, Berlin’s approach to making sense of moral experience has much in common with his Oxford colleague and friend, Stuart Hampshire. Hampshire shares Berlin’s opposition to the enduring philosophical view that moral conflict is an illusion or the symptom of some form of rational failure. Like Berlin, he sets out to explain the nature and sources of moral disagreement through a phenomenological understanding of our ordinary ethical lives.17 Both of them rely on history, anthropology and 17  Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (1983: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), Innocence and Experience (1989: Allen Lane, London) and Justice is Conflict (2000: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).

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literature to understand ethical  experience and derive their philosophical views about morality from their historical and humanistic investigations and indeed  their own first-hand  observations of contemporary society. This approach leads them to see ethical disagreement as inescapable rather than pathological and to insist that it is an illusion to believe that there is no such thing as a genuinely irresolvable moral dilemma. As Hampshire argues: Whether it is Aristotelian, Kantian, Humean, or utilitarian, moral philosophy can do harm when it implies that there ought to be, and that there can be, fundamental agreement on, or even convergence in, moral ideals – the harm is that the reality of conflict, both within individuals and within societies, is disguised by the myth of humanity as a consistent moral unit across time and space. There is a false blandness in the myth, an aversion from reality.18

The hybrid mode of descriptive and evaluative enquiry that Berlin and Hampshire pursue, therefore, is not of the theoretically pure, neat and abstract kind that defines the prevailing genre of analytic normative philosophy, the kind that makes the real world answerable to theory rather than the other way around. Their approach is promiscuous, cross-­ disciplinary and contextual and it derives its insights and recommendations from the study of history, social and political institutions, literature and the real world of shared human experience. It also involves what might be called mixed thinking, the type of promiscuous, polymathic reflection that relies on the accumulation and synthesis of a vast range of seemingly unrelated data and argument from such divergent subjects as history, political science, law, philosophy, cultural anthropology and imaginative literature to produce a genuinely coherent and insightful account of the modern human situation or, at least, a relevant part of it. This approach helps to explain Berlin’s distinctive mode of argumentation which contrasts sharply with the arid and formal style of enquiry characteristic of the analytic tradition. In the words of Joshua L. Chernis and Steven B. Smith, Berlin’s philosophical style is informed by esprit de finesse rather than esprit de geometrie.19 Berlin is essentially a centrifugal polymath as distinct from a centripetal one, a thinker who is committed to discovering patterns and 18  Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (1983: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 155. 19  Joshua L. Chernis and Steven B. Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 2.

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truths about human affairs without assuming that they must form part of a single, all-embracing or pre-existing system of thought.20 Next comes the more substantive question of whether value pluralism is a coherent and convincing metaethical position  – metaethics can be defined as the study of the nature of morality while normative ethics is concerned with the defensibility and desirability of particular moral views and states of affairs.21 The answer to this question is largely dependent on the extent to which one is prepared to endorse the theory of cognitive underdetermination about morality. Berlin doesn’t use this term himself – he studiously avoided such neologisms, preferring the much vaguer term ‘objective pluralism’ – but it is clear that his metaethical pluralism commits him to it.22 Ethical cognitive underdeterminism is the thesis that allows Berlin reconcile his conviction that moral objectivism is consistent with the ubiquitous and permanent fact of ethical disagreement. It does this by arguing that while genuine and enduring  moral dilemmas do not have uniquely right answers, they are, nonetheless, susceptible to better and worse rational responses. Authentic, everyday moral conflicts are unresolvable not primarily on account of shortcomings or mistakes in our rational thinking and/or flaws in our moral characters but because the reality of our raw, everyday moral situation does not lend itself to rationally determinate and definitive solutions. To assume that moral dilemmas must have uniquely correct solutions is once again, according to Berlin, to fall victim 20  See HF2 2. Perhaps a more accurate description of Berlin is that of a centrifugal fox. For a wide-ranging study of the nature of polymathism, see Peter Burke’s recent The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag (2020: Yale University Press, Conn). 21  See T. M. Scanlon, ‘The Aims and Authority of Moral Theory’ Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 12, Spring 1992, 1–23, for a philosophically subtle discussion of the nature of and connection between meta-ethics and normative ethics. Scanlon’s paper is particularly good at showing why it is philosophically implausible to argue that metaethical enquiry can be value-neutral in the way that logical positivism assumes and requires. 22  The philosopher who has conducted the most original and significant work on moral cognitive under-determination or what he calls ‘sensible cognitivism’ is David Wiggins. See his formidably impressive paper, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’ in David Wiggins, Needs, Values and Truth (1987: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 87–137. Another excellent, if less philosophically original, paper in this area is Susan Wolf’s ‘Two Levels of Pluralism’ in Ethics 102 (July 1992), 785–98. It is worth noting that the concept of cognitive underdetermination is not restricted to moral discourse but also has a place in the philosophy of science. I am referring, in particular, to the under-determination of theory by evidence in which we are confronted with empirically equivalent theories. See, for example, Laudan, L and Leplin, J., ‘Empirical Equivalence and Under-determination’, Journal of Philosophy 1991, no. 88., 449–72.

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to the illusion of moral monism. Similarly, to infer that morality is purely an arbitrary affair from the absence of uniquely correct solutions to complex moral problems is to assume that the only credible alternative to moral monism or absolutism is some species of moral subjectivism. Value pluralism offers a coherent and more truthful account of ethical experience by arguing that a belief in moral objectivism is compatible with the recognition that ethical diversity and disagreement are pervasive, objective and irreducible both in principle and in practice. It might be helpful at this stage if we make things more concrete and illustrate what cognitive underdetermination looks like in practice. I shall return for convenience to the case that Sartre famously reports in Existentialism and Humanism concerning the question that was put to him by a young man during World War Two Faced with the dilemma between joining the Resistance and leaving his vulnerable mother alone or minding her and thereby yielding to the German occupation of his homeland, Sartre offered the following advice to the morally tormented man: You are free, therefore, to choose […]. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do.23

What, if anything, differentiates Berlin’s moral pluralism from Sartre’s existential humanism? This is a trickier question than it seems once we move beyond the familiar caricature of Sartrean anguished freedom. Let’s begin with what they have in common. They share a recognition that the godless world in which we operate is devoid of transcendent metaphysical moral properties that can provide us with authoritative and unambiguous moral commandments; furthermore the more earth-bound and optimistic moral epistemologies of deontology and utilitarianism have lost their credibility and appeal because of their irredeemably reductionist distortions of the stubborn complexity of human life, particularly the recalcitrance of pervasive and perpetual moral conflict. Where pluralism diverges from existentialism is in its emphasis on a ‘human horizon’, which assumes a minimal but objective area of common evaluative experience while acknowledging the unavoidability of substantive moral conflict. Accordingly, where Sartre tends to portray our existential situation as an ethically bleached setting where we are essentially alone in the company of our own unencumbered conscience, Berlin argues that the world of human  Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism & Humanism (1948: Methuen, London), 38.

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affairs is less of an unbounded moral void than existentialists are prone to dramatizing. Let me now make a bold attempt, perhaps grossly presumptuous, at sketching what Berlin might have said or written if he had been asked the same question by the young Frenchman in 1939:24 The fact that you already feel you are the midst of a truly terrible predicament is a testimony to your moral sensitivity and integrity as an individual. Before I offer you my thoughts, for what they are worth, may I express my heartfelt sorrow that you have found yourself in such cruel and, no doubt, intolerable circumstances. As an Oxford don who has spent much of his charmed life reading the writings of contemporary and long-dead philosophers, I’m afraid I know of no authoritative conceptual solution that would provide a uniquely right answer to the conflict you face. Most moral philosophers, past and present, would no doubt disagree with me, arguing that there is an objectively correct way of resolving your dilemma. But none of their efforts has struck me as particularly convincing. They all tend to share, in their different ways, the core assumption of what I call moral monism. Monism is essentially the idea that all genuine human values and ends are not only compatible but form part of a hierarchical and harmonious system, with the result that there can be no genuine moral conflict of any kind. I don’t share this view. My own heterodox philosophical position is that human values and ends, including ethical ones, conflict with one another, but are no less objective and important for that. In fact, I claim that the rawness and reality of moral conflict is the most telling sign that morality is objective: if our moral disagreements and dilemmas were merely subjective, in the sense of being entirely arbitrary and non-rational, then we would not experience the agony and anguish that we so evidently do in such cases. I call my own philosophical viewpoint pluralism. It consists of three fundamental and overlapping theses: that that there is an irreducible plurality of moral values and ideas, secondly, that these values and ideals are incommensurable, by which I mean that their relative worth cannot be 24  The closest Berlin comes to discussing the Sartrean case of the student caught between the commitments of filial duty and the call of patriotism is in his interview with Steven Lukes, ‘Isaiah Berlin: In Conversation with Steven Lukes’, Salmagundi no.120, Fall, 1998, 106–8. Berlin was more prone to refer to the case of a British intelligence officer during the war faced with the dilemma of his military duty to extract valuable enemy information from a French traitor who was effectively a dead man walking and respecting the same man’s final request that ‘If you can save my life I’ll talk. But if you can’t save my life, then why should I?’. The publication of Stuart Hampshire’s Innocence and Experience confirmed that he was the intelligence officer that Berlin had referred to without revealing his identity.

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measured according some infallible tribunal of reason and, finally, that they are in frequent and ineliminable competition with one another. Perhaps a better and less technical way of describing your terrible quandary is that it is one in which you are caught in a conflict between right and right. Your sense of love for and commitment to your mother finds itself competing with your sense of loyalty and obligation to your imperilled homeland. Circumstances have conspired to force you to make a cruel choice. Unless things radically change – for instance, the war improbably ends sooner rather than later, your mother suddenly dies or the Resistance decline you on medical grounds – you can’t fulfil your filial duties as well as the call of moral patriotism. There is no possibility of a trade-off here. Whatever you end up choosing, you will, most likely, be left with a deep and enduring pang of regret and moral loss. Moreover, there is, in my view, no way of obviating the sense of loss you will experience following your decision. That’s what makes this a genuine, dare I say, pluralistic predicament. So, what to do? The short answer is that only you can and should answer that question. But I will leave with the following ruminations. The first is that that while there is no unique right answer to your dilemma, there are surely better and worse ways of responding to it. It seems to me that one of the less serious ways of confronting a conflict like yours is draining it of its significance by blindly plumping one way or the other. The absence of a right answer does not get us off the hook. Deciding between family and country is not analogous to choosing on which racehorse to back. Another way of conveying the same point is to say that God may be dead (He has ceased to be credible), but that doesn’t mean that everything is meaningless and therefore permitted. We must at least try, no matter how conflicted we may be, to face the hard, even impossible, question with all the honesty, dignity and authenticity we can muster. In the final analysis, we can say that the reasons we give for whatever choice we end up making our own distinctive reasons. I urge you not to lose hold of the precarious reality which has enabled you to acquire and nurture the basic moral decency to perceive your predicament. For it is also an immeasurably precious reality, especially in these barbarous times we find ourselves in. The very existence, even possibility, of moral dilemmas is dependent on human beings retaining a sense of what I call the common human horizon, by which I mean the recognition of a minimum set of human traits such as a sense of right and wrong, a feeling of solidarity for our fellow men, a basic, elemental sanity and desire for survival, and a conviction that we are free to choose how we live our lives. These most basic moral features of human nature, which are neither inevitable nor indestructible, do

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not show us how to decide the hard questions of life, but they do render their occurrence feasible. The world of humanity is not magically endowed with an infallible algorithm which we can exploit to crank out right answers to life’s difficult and occasionally intolerable dilemmas. Nor does there exist a moral equivalent to the external world; to act as if there is or should be such a deus ex machina or ethical noumena that can somehow guide us is to remain in the grip of a metaphysical illusion and one that denies rather than affirms our humanity. So it’s not so much that you are condemned to be free – as your countryman Sartre says – but that your sense of freedom is what makes and keeps us human. One of my distinguished countrymen  – for I am a Russian  – Anton Chekhov, once said that a writer’s business is not to provide solutions, only to describe a situation so truthfully, do such justice to all sides of the question, that the reader could no longer evade it. I have fallen woefully short of fulfilling Chekhov’s instruction, but I trust and hope that I have not said anything that would dissuade you from truthfully facing rather than dishonestly evading your all too human predicament.25

Knowledge, Truth and Morals We shall now return to a topic that was only touched on earlier, namely, the connection between knowledge and truth. It will be recalled that a dual conception of knowledge was introduced to make room for an objectivist understanding of ethics as well as science. But, as I also remarked, this move raises a fundamental question about the relation of each of these accounts of knowledge to truth.26 The first theory of knowledge, in which knowledge is contrasted with error, would appear to have a robust relation with truth as we ordinarily understand it since it lines up more readily with 25  Sartre’s advice to the student is briefer but cryptically so: ‘You are free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.’ Existentialism & Humanism, 38. Sartre’s words tend to exaggerate the moral indeterminacy of the human condition to such an extent that it is rendered amoral. His response of the dilemma leaves us with the lingering suspicion that he hasn’t quite got over the absence or loss of a transcendent vindication of morality, that he a disappointed Platonist. So the difference between Berlin and Sartre is as much about substance as it as about temperament and tone. 26  Another major question that it raises that is beyond the scope of this book is the metaphysical and epistemological one of the tension between these two different concepts of knowledge and their relations to truth.

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our scientific and common-sense view of truth. We are either right or wrong in ascertaining the facts about the world, facts which we assume apply independently of what we happen to believe or think. Some of these facts are derived from the most straightforward perceptual observations at one extreme (e.g. I see and hear the rain outside) to the more complex application of the methods of induction at the other (e.g. the Big Bang theory). Others are arrived at deductively, such as those of mathematics and logic (e.g. 2 + 2 = 4, all bachelors are unmarried) and, of course, there are other facts that rely on a combination of the deductive and inductive methods, such as, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’27 We believe that our knowledge of empirical and logical facts corresponds with the way things really are in the world. This epistemological model puts forward an account of knowledge which contrasts error. It is also one that is associated with the correspondence theory of truth, which holds that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by how it relates to reality and whether it accurately mirrors the world.28 I am more concerned, for the purposes of this chapter, with the second theory of knowledge and its relation to truth. If we are willing to accept that knowledge can be contrasted with ignorance and not only with error, then we are still left with the question of what kind of truth, if any, is compatible with such an epistemology? Again, it is important to highlight that this is not a theme which Berlin addressed in any kind of direct or 27  It should be said that nearly every scientific result is a complex combination of empirical observation, hypothesis formation and deduction of possible consequences all of which form part of the process of testing and explanation. 28  The correspondence theory of truth, which tends to cohere more readily with our modern pre-theoretical impression of the truth, has come under increasing pressure in the last hundred years. Einstein’s theory of relativity put a huge spanner in the works of those who believed that the progress of science from roughly the beginning of modernity could be described as a story of scientific knowledge growing by the steady, irreversible accumulation of facts which would inevitably give us a complete and unalterable picture of reality. Since the discovery of the theory of relativity, and, following it, quantum mechanics, the influential idea that we are gradually converging on a uniquely true, concept-free account of Reality has become deeply problematic: squaring the basis of the pre-Einstein account of the success of science with the theory of relativity and succeeding developments has proved a major challenge, to put it mildly. The philosophical challenges confronting the correspondence theory of truth have yet to infiltrate our common-sense understanding of the world. However, one of the consequences of this development within philosophical circles is that Kant’s epistemology has reasserted its significance, notwithstanding the fact that his theory of knowledge is far from unproblematic. We will be touching on this theme in subsequent chapters.

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theoretically explicit way in his writings. Nonetheless, his broadly humanistic conception of philosophy and, in particular, his pluralistic account of morality lead us to this line of enquiry. It will be helpful if we begin with something insightful that Colin McGinn has recently said on the matter of the relation of knowledge to truth.29 McGinn asks the provocative question ‘Does knowledge imply truth?’ and comes up with the following intriguing suggestion: given ‘that the truth requirement seems rather strict and inflexible  – it fails to match the actual scope of what we call knowledge’, he asks why don’t we relax the absolute and constricting hold that ‘clear, unblemished truth’ has over knowledge?’ The relevance of this move is most obvious in the ethical domain when we ask questions such as ‘Is genocide wrong?’ or ‘Is pain good?’. If we are prepared to take the step proposed by McGinn, then we will not feel obliged to respond to these questions by having to concede that either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers are neither true nor false on the basis that ethical statements do not fulfil such a strict and obdurate notion of truth. Instead, by either cutting the tie between knowledge and absolute truth or by introducing a notion of degrees of truth, we can begin to think of ethical knowledge either independently of the absolute and uniform idea of truth or as consistent with a more suitably scalar notion of ethical truth. This will allow us to claim that certain moral positions are epistemologically better than others without having to fulfil the impossible criterion that for a moral position to be worthy of cognitive appraisal it must be either true or false entirely and absolutely. We can now bring Ayer’s emotivism and Berlin’s moral pluralism back into the frame and assess their respective moral philosophies. Ayer thought that it was possible and proper to do moral philosophy without making any substantive moral judgements. As we have seen, this didn’t mean he shied away from making first order moral judgements, it’s just that he didn’t consider such activity as strictly moral philosophy. For Ayer and indeed for most other analytic philosophers of the pre- and post-war period, moral philosophy was not about taking part in substantive ethical discussion so much as engaging in the second-order analysis of morality. The former involved stating and recommending what is good or worthy or right on the various moral and political issues of the day while the latter is exclusively concerned with the elucidation and clarification of the 29  Colin McGinn, Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays (2017: MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass), 139–41.

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assumptions, concepts and principles underlying our everyday moral thoughts and conduct. Second-order moral philosophy or metaethics, as it was (and still is) called, was informed by two core assumptions: the first is that any defensible form of metaethical discourse must not presuppose or imply any ethical values, and secondly that all philosophically viable analyses of ethics should be done in a strictly value-free way, that is, without assuming or implying any substantive moral position. In his paper ‘Analysis of Moral Judgements’ Ayer stated that the question of why we respond in different ways to particular moral situations is ‘a question for the sociologist’ rather than a problem for the moral philosopher.30 Berlin adopted a very different approach to normative philosophy. While not denying that second-order analysis of our moral beliefs and doctrines can be a worthwhile pursuit, he was deeply sceptical that it could be carried out in a value-neutral manner. Furthermore, he insisted that restricting the study of moral philosophy to the notionally value-free analysis of ‘the language of morals’ was as reductively absurd as it was normatively empty. His justification for this negative assessment was based on the claim that no plausible metaethical theory could leave the content of ethics entirely open: Statements about physical nature can achieve neutrality in this respect; this is more difficult when the data are those of history, and nearly impossible in the case of moral and social life, where words themselves are inescapably charged with ethical or aesthetic or political content. […] The idea of a completely wertfrei theory (or model) of human action (as contrasted, say, with animal behaviour) rests on a naïve misconception of what objectivity or neutrality in the social studies must be. (CC2 206)

Moreover, not only did Berlin deny that second-order, parasitical analyses of ethics, – as distinct from first-order moral and political philosophy, which engages in and typically puts forward substantive normative claims – could be value-free, but, on a deeper level, his entire oeuvre is informed by the conviction that reason has a constitutive and indispensable place in evaluative thought and debate. His belief in the rationality of value

30  A.  J. Ayer, ‘Analysis of Moral Judgements’, in Horizon, 1948, Vol. xx, No.117 and republished in his Philosophical Essays (1954: MacMillan, London), 238.

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judgements is conveyed most directly in a relatively obscure essay, published in 1964, in which he remarks.31 a man who cannot see that the suffering of pain is an issue of major importance in human life  – that it matters at all  – who cannot see why anyone would wish to know – still less mind – whether pain is caused or not, provided he does not suffer it himself, is virtually beyond the reach of communication from the world occupied by me and my fellow men. His whole pattern of experience is remote from mine; communication is as unattainable as it is with a man who thinks that he is Julius Caesar or that he is dead or that he is a doorknob, like the characters in the stories of E. T. A. Hoffman. This seems to me to show that recognition of some values – however general and however few – enters into the normal definition of what constitutes a sane human being. We may find that these ends do not remain constant if we look far enough in time and space; yet this does not alter the fact that beings totally lacking such ends can scarcely be described as human; still less as rational. In this sense, then, pursuit of, or failure to pursue, certain ends can be regarded as evidence of – and in extreme cases part of the definition of – irrationality. (CC2 317)

It’s clear that Berlin held a cognitive theory of value, albeit a qualified one. He argued that anyone who could not relate to  the validity of what he referred to variously as ‘a common human nature’, ‘a human horizon’ or ‘a minimum core of human values’ was effectively beyond the pale of our shared sense of humanity. Crucially, he also argued that there is nothing necessary or inevitable in any kind of a priori way about the existence of a common human nature and its associated set of minimum human values. As he explained in a reply to a critic in the final decade of his life: I do indeed say ‘that there are a “minimum” of such values “without which societies could scarcely survive”’. That is an empirical fact: if people were allowed to murder each other indiscriminately, or if truth were never observed in people’s statements, or if the means of human subsistence or security were destroyed, and the like, human society would not be able to survive. That also is an empirical fact of very wide application. But it does not follow that someone could not reject these values, and doom human societies to perdition, or at any rate try to do so: that would certainly place

31  Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Rationality of Value Judgements’ in Carl J. Friedrich ed. Rational Decision, Nomos 7 (1964: Atherton Press, London).

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someone attempting to do it beyond the horizon of common human values. (CTH2 317)

The first important caveat to acknowledge about Berlin’s diffident ethical cognitivism is his insistence on the empirical rather than the theoretically necessary presence of ‘the horizon of common human values’. Berlin could have been more explicit about his claim that a minimum set of shared human values is a condition rather than a consequence of human understanding. For Berlin our very concept of humanity has baked into itself the assumption that we share basic human values upon which our capacity for mutual human understanding necessarily relies. Moreover, since our sense of commonality appears to precede and make possible our ability to understand other members of our species, it should hardly be surprising that we judge those who abjectly fail to exhibit a minimal level of basic values to be beyond the human pale.32 This is a notoriously deep  and contested issue that will need to be articulated and discussed more fully in subsequent chapters, but for now it is sufficient to make the point that, in contrast to Ayer, Berlin sees no contradiction or self-reflexive inconsistency in postulating certain normative facts about human beings or human conduct. He effectively turns the tables on the emotivist and asks why such obvious moral truths as the wrongness of killing someone for the thrill of it, lying with impunity or the intentional destruction of the planet would cease to be truths from a putatively objective perspective. The emotivist, he implies, seems to be under the illusion that unless there 32  This does not deny, of course, that part of our shared humanity lies in our capacity to be inhuman to each other. Indeed, the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man may be said to be more pervasive and conspicuous than man’s humanity to man even if we grant that the world has become a more peaceful and less dangerous place over the course of human history. While most parts of the globe may no longer resemble a Hobbesian state of nature in any kind of obvious or primitive sense, it hardly needs saying that fear, envy, hypocrisy, selfishness and cruelty remain pervasive and deeply rooted features of the human situation, not to mention the not unpressing existential point that even if we manage to avoid blowing ourselves up in a nuclear war we seem incapable of slowing down humanly-caused global warming in spite of the ghastly and undeniable warnings of what awaits us and the rest of the living planet if we persist with our destructive and unsustainable habits. No amount of optimistic talk about the better angels of our nature or the seemingly endless and occasionally edifying forms of human ingenuity can obscure the fact that we are in so many ways a disastrous species. It’s the possibility that only we ourselves are capable of perceiving that we are such lamentable creatures which offers the only real hope that we might change our ways for the better.

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exists some a priori proof that demonstrates that, for instance, killing for fun is ethically indefensible then morals remain outside the sphere of truth and rational discussion. Ayer’s emotivism amounts to an urbane form of moral nihilism. The second and more nuanced qualification attaching to Berlin’s cognitive pluralism is his conviction that once we move beyond the minimum morality required for society to survive in any recognisably humane way, there is no authoritative and substantive ethical blueprint about how we should live our lives. The unavailability of such a blueprint is explained by the fact that human values and ends, while objective, are cognitively underdetermined. Accordingly, faced with the dilemma between the call of patriotism and the pull of family, or, for a politician, between the values and commitments of political morality versus those of private ethics, there is no algorithm that can tell us what we should objectively do. Granting the objectivity of moral values and human ends does not entail or require moral absolutism. This is a radical idea since it is a virtual bromide of the Western philosophical tradition that the recognition of deep and unavoidable moral conflict is inimical to the idea  of  moral objectivity. It is also worth reiterating the point that, according to Berlin, ethical dilemmas are not an exceptional occurrence in life but a pervasive and inevitable feature of our ordinary, raw experience: the Sartrean case of the conflicted student and the Machiavellian problem of the unavoidability of admirable immorality in the political sphere are merely dramatic cases of a common and widespread phenomenon of everyday life. As Berlin says in the Introduction to Four Essays on Liberty: The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament. (L 43)

This leaves us with the poser of how Berlin’s metaethical pluralism stacks up in relation to the truth? The first thing to emphasise is that the truth forms a central and distinctive plank of Berlin’s metaethical thesis since he is not merely claiming that moral pluralism is a sociological fact. That would be insufficiently controversial. Rather he is affirming that value pluralism is, in a more demanding epistemological and normative sense, a historically and humanistically based truth. The significance of the distinction between the sociological fact and the metaethical truth of value pluralism emerges more clearly through acknowledging that while most people would readily agree that we live in a world defined by moral diversity and

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disagreement, fewer would necessarily recognise or accept that such diversity and disagreement is ultimate and ineradicable. It is this latter, more radical metaethical claim that connects Berlin’s value pluralism with a significant truth claim. The truth of value pluralism is the kind of truth that is far more compatible with truth as contrasted with ignorance rather than truth as contrasted with error. To be compelled to argue that the truth of value pluralism is true in the typically scientific sense of the excessively demanding error-contrasted conception of truth would be absurd since it would require that it is the truth and the whole truth and that all competing moral theories are false. But to claim that the truth of value pluralism is true in the sense of the ignorance-contrast account of truth is more plausible. For, in the second case, one is not asking if the theory of value pluralism is true or false in the strictly dichotomous sense but claiming that it is more true to our common human experience than emotivism is, that it stays faithful to the strong intuition that moral beliefs and judgements are irreducibly cognitive in their ambition and their content. The burden of proof now centres on showing that value pluralism describes a large and vital element of our modern moral experience rather than offering an impossibly complete, irrefutable and self-contained moral theory. Of course, Ayer might respond by saying that Berlin’s notion of value pluralism comes down, in the end, to nothing more than a moral hunch. From Ayer’s perspective, Berlin pays insufficient attention to what should be the initial and core philosophical task, namely, determining whether a given question is cogntively meaningful. Berlin’s failure to fulfil this crucial task means that he takes far too much for granted, including the belief that morality is strictly meaningful. And Ayer would no doubt add that if we were to label all such moral hunches or intuitions as true, even on the basis of the more flexible, scalar sense of truth as contrasted with ignorance, our basic notion of truth would quickly lose its meaning and collapse into epistemological chaos under the pressure of its own excessively inclusive and indiscriminate logic. The key to making sense of morality, argue emotivists, does not lie in trying per impossibile to define its content but in identifying its essential purpose, which is the non-cognitive one of producing effects, that is, to elicit and influence certain moral attitudes and reactions in others. With Ayer, morality becomes virtually indistinguishable from rhetoric and, as everyone knows, the success or otherwise of the art of persuasive argument is not dependent on or constrained by  the truth. And, of course, this is consistent with the logical positivist conception of philosophy which was committed to reconceiving and

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repurposing philosophy as a scientific enterprise in which human thought is understood on the basis of an unsentimental empiricism. This view of the philosophical enterprise is encapsulated in Moritz Schlick’s observation: The empiricist does not say to the metaphysician “what you say is false” but, “what you say asserts nothing at all!”33

Metaethical Judgments and Normative Convictions Many of us find Ayer’s view of morality, or at least, more sophisticated versions of moral expressivism put forward by more recent thinkers such as J.  L. Mackie, Gilbert Harman and Simon Blackburn, more plausible than the one put forward by Berlin.34 A general reason for being sceptical of moral cognitivism, even the weak or underdetermined form is that it strikes us as, literally, too good to be true. We might be prepared to grant that Berlin’s account of moral values and moral conflict possesses a certain validity as a factual description of our current moral situation, but to be told that it must be true in some normative, extra-sociological sense strikes us as a bridge too far, a veritable whistle in the wind. Can we honestly believe that a species which emerged like the rest of life from the ‘primeval soup’ possesses some magical moral dust that conveniently elevates us above the rest of nature? We may not share Ayer’s at times  crude and extreme emotivism, but those of us with fundamentally naturalistic sympathies believe morality is, at bottom, an irreducibly subjective affair and, consequently, impossible to square with any form of moral cognitivism. The seemingly undeniable truth of Hume’s famous statement can’t help but ring in our ears: Morals and criticism are not properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment…When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract rea33  Moritz Schlick, ‘Positivism and Realism’ in A. J. Ayer ed. Logical Positivism (1959: Free Press, New York), 107. 34  J.  L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977: Penguin, London), Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (1977, Oxford University Press, Oxford) and Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (1998, Clarendon Press, Oxford). I have also benefited from reading Simon Blackburn’s essay ‘Real Ethics’ which he was kind enough to share in advance of its forthcoming publication.

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soning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.35

It would appear, therefore, that claims of moral cognitivism crucially lack the external or naturalistic validation required to endow them with the absolute and objective status they mistakenly assume or so desperately crave. This gets to the heart of what is enduringly attractive about Ayer’s metaethical  viewpoint which is that it’s basically correct. To insist that morality relates, in some obscure and improbable way, to the truth is to impose on the concept of truth an intolerable level of semantic and epistemological open-endedness and even chaos. The truth is and must be all or nothing and to suggest otherwise is to indulge in mere wishful thinking. The moment we cease regarding truth as having a single uniform nature is the moment it loses its meaning and value. Moreover, as Simon Blackburn has argued, one doesn’t need to accept Ayer’s view of morality to see that there is no need to introduce the concept of truth into moral discourse and debate. He makes this point quite nicely by arguing that there is no need to give Pontius Pilate two problems when he only has one; Pilate’s task is to determine whether Jesus is guilty of the crime of which he is accused; he does not need to commit himself to the additional one of determining if it is true that Jesus is guilty of the crime for which he is accused.36 Truth adds nothing here except unnecessary confusion. Of course, not all of us who deny the existence of moral facts or truths share Ayer’s exuberant sangfroid. Bertrand Russell expressed the more tragic side of ethical non-cognitivism with typical clear-eyed brevity: I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it.37

Russell’s qualms about the implications of the subjectivity of values raises a seemingly insuperable difficulty regarding the subjectivist defence of a liberal, decent society, a difficulty that Russell more than hints at in the above passage. It’s the familiar self-contradictory challenge faced by  David Hume, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, Part III, 131.  Simon Blackburn, Truth (2017: Profile Books, London), 54. 37  Bertrand Russell, ‘Last Perplexities’ in Russell on Ethics, Charles Pigden ed. (1999: Routledge, London), 165. 35 36

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subjectivism but no less serious for all that. It can be stated straightforwardly enough: if one’s moral and political ideals are essentially subjective preferences, on what basis can an emotivist like Ayer justify his own liberal convictions against those who do not share his political morality?38 For once we affirm that our normative judgements and convictions, even those which are most enduringly and intensely held, are devoid of rational content, we leave ourselves wide open to the inevitable triumph of the amoral or nihilist doctrine that might is right or its supposedly more benign version of anything goes. The subjectivist defence of liberalism, the argument goes, amounts to no serious defence at all. Several of Berlin’s critics have argued that his own pluralist defence of a liberal, open society suffers from much the same fatal weakness as Ayer’s subjectivist justification of liberal toleration. The case against Berlin is made most forcefully and concisely by the communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel: In view of the ultimate plurality of ends, Berlin concludes, freedom of choice is “a truer and more humane ideal” than the alternatives….Although Berlin is not strictly speaking a relativist – he affirms the ideal of freedom of choice – his position comes perilously close to foundering on the relativist predicament. If one’s convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? In a tragically-configured moral universe, such as Berlin assumes, is the ideal of freedom any less subject than competing ideals to the ultimate incommensurability of values? If so, in what can its privileged status consist? If it is just not one value among many, then what can be said for liberalism?39

Sandel raises a seemingly legitimate challenge which implies that Berlin’s pluralist defence of a liberalism is no defence at all, since it arbitrarily privileges the value of freedom and thereby negates its avowal that freedom is no less ‘subject than competing ideals to the ultimate incommensurability of values.’ His argument for liberalism ends up contradicting itself by prioritising freedom at the cost of violating its own pluralist premise. ‘[T]he real difficulty …’, argues Michael Ignatieff, ‘is that the pluralist logically 38  Bernard Williams offers a characteristically astute answer to this question which seems to me to show that Ayer’s subjectivist defence of toleration, even when sympathetically interpreted, is cripplingly lame. See Bernard Williams, ‘Subjectivism and Toleration’ in A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, A. Phillips Griffiths, ed. (1991: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 197–208. 39  Michael Sandel, Liberalism and its Critics (1984: Blackwell, Oxford), 8.

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cannot put liberty first. Liberty is simply one of the values that must be reconciled with others; it is not the trump card. If so, why should a free society be valued at all?’40 There is a temptation to conclude that Berlin’s pluralist account of liberalism is untenable and it is a temptation that has proved irresistible to a legion of academic critics.41 But it is a critique that amounts to a huge and boring waste of time. Leaving aside the fact that it entirely misses the point that one can stand up for one’s beliefs but not dogmatically (that is, passionately hold one’s beliefs without refusing to expose them to the scrutiny of the competitive marketplace of ideas), its main weakness resides in the theoretically perverse assumption that the primary way of making sense of political morality is to judge the defensibility of a particular normative political theory in terms of its formal unity and logical coherence. According to this mode of argument, if it can be demonstrated that Berlin’s pluralistic liberalism commits him to a formal contradiction or inconsistency, such as that his commitment to value pluralism does not logically entail his advocacy of liberal toleration or that his affirmation of the truth of pluralism is inconsistent with the value he attaches to negative liberty, then the conclusion we are obliged to reach is that his political philosophy is in terminal trouble. The central problem with this critique is not that it is false but that it is foolish. It fails to see that nothing in the real world of politics hangs on such a formal proof or disproof or, alternatively, that moral ideals and values are required to logically entail one another to be considered coherent and compelling. What is bizarre about this approach is not merely that it makes practice answerable to theory in a fatuous way but that its conception of what constitutes a cogent theoretical understanding of politics is so  Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998: Chatto & Windus, London), 286.  There are, of course, other ways of responding to Sandel’s and Ignatieff’s similar-type question. John Gray offers an alternative and arresting response by amplifying what he sees as the ‘agonistic’ heart of Berlin’s liberalism. Gray’s reconstruction of Berlin’s political philosophy is informed and sophisticated but not entirely convincing either as an interpretation of Berlin or as an account of what constitutes a viable political theory. See, John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, (1995: Harper Colins, London). 8. Gray is no doubt correct to identify a tension in Berlin’s thought in its loyalty to elements of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, but I think that he is wrong in his rather extreme interpretation of how Berlin handles this tension. The most important thing about the tension between the Enlightenment and its mainly Romantic critics is that it is preserved. The need to recognise and balance the conflicting and incommensurable insights and ideals of the Enlightenment and Romanticism is what matters. Whether we choose to describe this fine balance as agonistic or not is a matter of secondary importance. 40 41

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vanishingly remote from anything that corresponds to the actual reality of the human situation. The content-free, logic-chopping mode of so much academic moral and political theory resembles a kind of nightmare in which the salutary query ‘That’s fine in theory but will it work in practice?’ is supplanted by its unhinged inversion ‘It works in practice but will it work in theory?’. In summary, the objective it sets for political philosophy is as unreachable as its theoretical mindset is pathological.42 But what is far more regrettable about this kind of arid, nit-picking critique of Berlin’s political theory is that it distracts us from grasping the profoundly interesting and significant features of his philosophical approach. This is symptomatic of a much graver disease that infects so much of contemporary analytic political theory. The main features of the malaise include, a denial of the deep contingency at the heart of human affairs, a failure to acknowledge that any normative political theory that aspires to be honest and helpful must be genuinely multidisciplinary and, finally, a refusal or perhaps inability to engage in the kind of normatively realistic and intellectually mixed form of enquiry that has any hope of adding value to the increasingly challenging and urgent issues of contemporary social and political life. The good news is that we are not obliged to follow the flights from reality that typify the rationalistic tendencies of conventional analytic political theory. In the chapters which follow we shall be examining alternative ways of how philosophy can help us make sense of our lives, ways which share a recognition that historical contingency and cultural context are far more central to the philosophical project of understanding the possibilities and limits of our existential condition. This will involve travelling to philosophical territory that is rarely visited by Berlin’s scholars but it is the rich terrain in which his acute and liberating ideas naturally occupy. It will, I hope, illuminate Berlin’s capacity to reveal the character and limits of human thought which may well be his most important gift to humanity. This chapter has given a taste of what is to come but its principal purpose has been negative. I have discussed Berlin’s view of morality and that of Ayer’s not so much to juxtapose their contrasting views of ethics but to bring to the surface the radically different conceptions of philosophy which undergird them. As we have seen, Ayer’s view of philosophy is 42  I provide a more extended critique of the logic-chopping and tilting-at-windmills tendencies within analytic political theory in my The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury, London), 118–22.

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narrowly scientific and, as a result, he has a correspondingly reductive view of the role and relevance of philosophy. He himself may have been a genuinely engaged public intellectual but, given his philosophical outlook, he could not claim in good faith that his own moral and political convictions possessed any more rational authority than those opposed to his. Unless one is willing to accept Ayer’s brand of logical positivism and its associated emotivism, there is very little reason to take him seriously as a political philosopher. The rub is that vast swathes of academic political science and indeed analytic political theory still operate, consciously or not, on the basis that some version of Ayer’s moral non-cognitivism has more truth on its side than not. This outcome is especially unfortunate since the theoretical foundations of Ayer’s logical positivism were largely consigned to the scrapheap of defunct philosophical ideas by the early 1950s while his emotivism has suffered a series of crippling attacks since the 1960s.43 But what, if any, are the viable alternatives to Ayer’s conception of philosophy? It is one thing to say that his philosophical outlook is wrong but can we replace it with something better? This chapter has taken the initial step of suggesting that Berlin may have a more persuasive and productive alternative but we have a long way to go before we can make good on that claim. The burden of the following chapters is to put significantly more philosophical and historical flesh on the pluralist bone as well as subject it to more robust scrutiny in an effort to determine just how truthful and helpful Berlin’s position is both in its epistemological and its more normative dimensions. Another major goal is to indicate how Berlin’s pluralism helps ground his defence of a liberal, tolerant society. Fulfilling these demanding goals requires us to answer the following questions. Firstly and fundamentally, what makes philosophical problems so intractable? Why should we think that philosophy can legitimately see itself as a humanistic discipline as distinct from a purely scientific or quasi-scientific enterprise?, What is the distinctive subject matter of philosophy or should we define philosophy in terms of a methodology?, Is there any progress in 43  W. V. Quine delivered the fatal blow to Ayer’s logical positivism in his 1951 paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ with its demonstration that the fundamental cleavage between the synthetic and the analytic is untenable. But it took a number of thinkers, principally Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, more time to expose the incoherence and vapidness of Ayer’s emotivism: Philippa Foot’s paper ‘Philosophy and Art’, Proceedings of the  British Academy, LVI (1970) offers a original take on what our moral thinking can and should learn from our aesthetic thinking. 

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philosophy?, Does philosophy need history and, if so, why?, Where does philosophy’s authority lie?, Is value pluralism a fact or a truth and, if the latter, what kind of truth is it?, Does Berlin’s endorsement of the value of negative liberty rely on the ultimate freedom of human beings?, Can Berlin’s allegiance to libertarian-style freedom be reconciled with what we know of the natural or physical world, Does Berlin’s defence of liberalism survive the recognition of our contingency? Is liberalism ethnocentric all the way down? Does pluralism offer a cogent defence of liberal society? These are among the principal questions we shall be addressing in the following chapters. Karl Marx famously said that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’44 As the human race hurtles with ever quickening pace towards its own environmental self-­ destruction – we find it easier as a species to live with the virtual certainty of our increasingly imminent demise than contemplate the possibility of curbing the more avaricious and suicidal elements of global capitalism – the truth of Marx’s remark is more relevant now than ever. But its obvious veracity should not imply that trying to make sense of the contemporary human situation is any less imperative. It is hard to see how we might change the world for the better if we fail to understand what is preventing us from doing so and, more crucially, what might qualify as better. The urgency of a solution does not make the means of producing it any less difficult or inevitable. It is far from clear if philosophy will end up playing a role in assisting humanity out of the dire mess it finds itself in, assuming, that is, that we decide to take on such a Herculean task. But surely an obligation that philosophy owes to itself and humanity is that if it ever manages to secure a genuine opportunity to help that it does not squander it for reasons of its own self-imposed complacency. I shall end this chapter with a passage from Berlin’s essay ‘The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities’. It doesn’t provide a cast iron proof that cognitive pluralism is conclusively true or that non-cognitive emotivism is demonstrably false or vice versa. Besides, it’s hard to conceive what such a clinching proof would look like or if it’s even achievable. Nonetheless, Berlin’s reflections might give those who are wedded to the belief that reason and truth have no legitimate place in ethics and that moral values must compare disadvantageously with scientific facts some pause for thought. I am thinking in particular of thinkers such as Ayer and 44  Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in David McLellan ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (1977: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 158.

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his contemporary successors who consider themselves among the ‘tough-­ minded’ rather than the ‘tender-minded’ of William James’ memorable two-fold classification of philosophers. More positively, it also gives a preview of the spirit that informs the more philosophically productive dialogues between Berlin and his interlocutors that are to follow. What I hope emerges from these dialectic conversations is a sense of the intellectual fertility and excitement that open up once we replace the picture of philosophy as the handmaiden of science with a conception of the subject as an essentially humanistic discipline. Berlin himself gives a flavour of the liberating and empowering  effect of regarding philosophy in primarily humanistic terms in his commentary on the originality of the early modern Neapolitan thinker, Giambattista Vico, who emphasised that in everyday life we are participants and in the natural sciences most of us are mainly spectators: there existed a field of knowledge besides that of the most obviously man-­ made constructions – works of art, or political schemes, or legal systems, and indeed, all rule-determined disciplines  – which men could know from within: human history; for it, too, was made by men. Human history did not consist merely of things and events and their consequences and sequences (including those of human organisms viewed as natural objects), as the external world did; it was the story of human activities, of what men did and thought and suffered; of what they strove for, aimed at, accepted, rejected, conceived, imagined, of what their feelings were directed at. It was concerned, therefore, with motives, purposes, hopes, fears, loves and hatreds, jealousies, ambitions, outlooks, and visions of reality; with the ways of seeing, and ways of acting and creating, of individuals and groups. These activities we knew directly, because we were involved in them as actors, not spectators. There was a sense, therefore, in which we know more about ourselves than we knew about the external world; […]. What was opaque to us when we contemplated the external world was, if not wholly transparent, yet surely far more so when we contemplated ourselves. It was, therefore, a perverse kind of self-denial to apply the rules and laws of physics or of the other natural sciences to the world of the mind and will and feeling; for by doing this we would be gratuitously debarring ourselves from much that we could know. […]. With regard to ourselves we were privileged observers with an ‘inside’ view: to ignore it in favour of the ideal of a unified science of all there is, a single, universal method of investigation, was to insist on wilful ignorance in the name of materialist dogma of what could alone be known. We know what is meant by action, purpose, effort to achieve something or to understand something – we know these things through direct consciousness of them. We possess self-awareness. (AC2 121–22)

CHAPTER 3

Berlin and J. L. Austin on Philosophy

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1

One of the more startling features of philosophy to the newcomer is that the subject finds it peculiarly hard to define itself. And yet it is precisely this aspect of philosophy that confirms its unique and inherently self-­ reflexive nature. For the question of philosophy’s character is itself a philosophical question, a question that seems destined to elude a full and final answer as long as the discipline itself exists. Working out why philosophy resists a clear and settled definition relates to a typically acute comment of Nietzsche that ‘only that which is without history can be defined’.1 Of course, plenty of objects and activities which have a history are straightforwardly definable. But the profundity of Nietzsche’s remark lies in the claim that phenomena which have an organic connection with their history tend to resist definition. The nature of philosophy’s relationship with its own past (and indeed the more general, non-­ philosophical past) forms a large and inextricable part of why it is so 1  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Chapter 13. It is possible of course to define philosophy as, for example, ‘the love or pursuit of wisdom’ or, more modestly, as ‘critical thinking about thinking’ but such lexicographical definitions tell us everything and nothing and, therefore, fail to be more than trivially true.

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difficult, if not impossible, to define. It also helps explain why philosophy has not been overwhelmed with consensus throughout its history. The intrinsic slipperiness and polymorphousness of philosophy have not inhibited philosophers from trying to identify what differentiates it from non-philosophical inquiries. In this chapter, we shall examine the efforts of Isaiah Berlin and John Austin to determine its more salient and distinguishing characteristics. We shall focus mainly on their second-order views about the identity of the subject, what might be referred to as their meta-philosophies or philosophies of philosophy as distinct from their more first-order, substantive philosophical doctrines. However, as we shall also see, the matter of the connection between their respective meta-­ philosophies and their own particular philosophical beliefs is a fascinating and under-explored one.

It Depends on What You Mean by … When confronted with questions such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’ or ‘Is democracy the least worst type of government?’ or more abstract and esoteric ones such as ‘What is consciousness?’ or ‘Does every event have a cause?’, ‘What is a number?’ a philosopher is prone to respond by saying, ‘It depends what do you mean by the meaning of life?’ or ‘What concept or usage of democracy are you referring to?’ or ‘Can you be more specific what you mean by a cause?’ and so on.2 This type of prophylactic response is inclined to prove puzzling or possibly annoying to the philosophically uninitiated, since it is felt we deserve better than this. After all, aren’t these precisely the sort of questions to which professional philosophers are expected to provide clear and helpful answers? The result is that more often than not the laity is left with the impression that philosophers are charlatans and that philosophy itself is elaborate waste of time. And the professionalisation of philosophy over the last hundred years has done little to change this misapprehension; for even if the curious general reader is prepared to suspend their initial puzzlement for more than a fleeting moment and delve a little deeper, the acute fragmentation, weird artificiality and endless neologisms of much of contemporary academic philosophy are not particularly inviting. 2  ‘It all depends on what you mean by …’ was C. E. M. Joad’s famous catchphrase on the BBC radio and later television programme, The Brains Trust, on which he was a regular guest during the 1940s and 1950s.

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This kind of commonsensical dismissal of philosophy usually rests on some narrow-minded and unreflective prejudice, ranging from blank bewilderment and boredom to philistine suspicion and contempt concerning general, abstract thought. In other words, there is nothing especially philosophical or interesting about our pre-theoretical frustrations with philosophy. One of the major ways this form of complaint conveys itself is by voicing unrealistic and unphilosophical expectations about philosophy’s capacity and interest in answering certain kinds of very general questions. As one notable philosopher of the time stated about people who raise this common grievance: They want philosophy to be grand, to yield one important, non-empirical information which will help one to solve either the world’s problems or one’s personal problems, or both. To them I feel inclined to reply in the end: “You are crying for the moon; philosophy has never fulfilled this task, though it may sometimes have appeared to do so (and the practical consequences of its appearing to do so have not always been very agreeable). It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events.”3

It is only when we are tempted to move beyond such prejudices and try to engage seriously with the subject that the possibility of genuine philosophical discovery occurs. One of the initial insights we reach as a result of a genuine interaction with philosophy is that before we rush in and attempt to answer a question, it is worth identifying if the particular question we are being asked to answer makes any sense in the first place. Philosophy impels us to assume very little and, as Wittgenstein remarked, a persistent challenge for the philosopher is ‘to say no more than we know.’4 Much of philosophy is preoccupied with the meaning and/or meaningfulness of questions, including the question ‘What is the meaning or point of philosophy?’. Of course, engaging into philosophical reflection offers no guarantee that one will end up thinking that philosophy is a meaningful or worthwhile endeavour. Such guarantees are unforthcoming in philosophy. In fact, there exists the very real chance that one may come up with philosophical reasons for thinking that philosophy itself is an 3  Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (1991: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 179–80. 4  Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (1958: Blackwell, Oxford), Blue Book, 7.

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infertile or meaningless form of enquiry. Indeed, the history of philosophy is littered with its own gravediggers, several of whom have been outstanding philosophers. And yet, rightly or wrongly, the subject has managed to survive the verdicts of its obituarists. A more commanding complaint about philosophy is that it is a subject locked in interminable and fruitless debate. There is a sense in which this criticism is not entirely wrong and a sense in which it is. It is undeniable that philosophy’s perennial questions such as ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘Is there such a thing as the truth?’, ‘What is beauty?’ or ‘Are moral values objective?’ that got the subject going in the first place remain unanswered. That leaves most onlookers feeling suspicious that there is something deeply wrong going on. How could a discipline which claims to be concerned with and accountable to the truth have no demonstrable progress to show for itself over its long history? It is, of course, possible that some day we might end up thinking that such suspicions are not founded. If that day comes then we must hope that the reasons given for philosophy’s emptiness and redundancy will be philosophical ones. In the meantime, the increasingly fragmented and specialised character of academic professional philosophy hardens while fewer and fewer people outside the groves of the academy take much notice of the subject. Yet, on a more fundamental, non-institutional level, one possible explanation for the persistence of philosophical dissent lies in the radical idea that not all meaningful questions possess or invite definitive answers. Philosophy asks us to be sensitive to the difference between a puzzle and a problem where the former may be thought to have a solution and an agreed method to discovering it but where a philosophical problem does not appear to have an solution nor a clear way of reaching one. More concretely, one might think of the difference between Pierre de Fermat’s Last Theorem and Socrates’ central poser ‘How should I live?’. The former remained unsolved for over three hundred and fifty years; Andrew Wiles’ proof of the theorem in 1995 showed that what many regarded as among the most difficult problems of mathematics was soluble after all and that its solution was conclusively and unanimously validated by experts in the specialist field of number theory. The Socratic question concerning how we should live our lives, however, is not only more contested than ever but it is far from obvious that we are any nearer arriving at a single, uniquely correct answer or, more fundamentally, that such an answer is even a coherent possibility. Philosophical reflection can of course prompt us to question the validity of what has long been an article of rationalistic (and, most recently, scientistic) faith, namely,

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that a genuine problem must have a single, definitive solution. But questioning this sacred assumption shouldn’t imply that the absence of such answers in philosophy is unproblematic for it is possible that the questions that philosophy concerns itself with are not merely unanswerable but meaningless. Quite a few philosophers have argued down the ages that philosophy’s central problems are nothing more than conceptual errors or the outcome of some other species of intellectual confusion or immaturity. But, rightly or wrongly, most philosophers most of the time have argued that the questions they are concerned with are meaningful and important, even if they do resist uniquely correct and verifiable answers. After all, a familiarity with the best philosophy produced since ancient Greece offers a powerful antidote to our habit of denying a problem’s reality on the basis that it is especially difficult to solve or even permanently intractable. Taking this point on board can trigger a more radical reconsideration of how we interpret the nature of philosophical project and what implications it might have for ascertaining the nature and possibility of philosophical progress. The different ways in which Berlin, Austin and several of their colleagues chose to practice philosophy immediately before and after the Second World War bore certain affinities with that of Socrates and his pupil Plato. Like their ancient Greek forebears, they believed the best way to philosophise is in conversation with like-minded souls rather than solo from the armchair. Their conversations began in the mid-1930s at the instigation of Austin, who would become the pre-eminent figure of Oxford ordinary language philosophy in the post-war era. Berlin recounts the origins of these informal talks in his essay ‘Austin and the early beginnings of Oxford philosophy’: At the end of the summer of 1936 Austin suggested that we hold regular philosophical discussions about topics which interested us and our contemporaries among Oxford philosophers. He wished the group to meet informally, without any thought of publishing our ‘results’ (if we ever obtained any), or any purpose but that of clearing our minds and pursuing the truth. We agreed to invite Ayer, MacNabb and Woozley, all of whom were at the time teaching philosophy at Oxford; to these, Stuart Hampshire, who had been elected a fellow of All Souls, and Donald MacKinnon, who had become a fellow of Keble, were added. The meetings began some time in 1936–7 (I think in the Spring of 1937). They took place on Thursdays in my rooms in All Souls after dinner, and continued, with a few intervals, until the summer of 1939. In retrospect they seem to me the most fruitful discussions of philosophy at which I was ever present (PI3 166).

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What, we may ask, made these dialogues so fascinating and influential? Certainly, part of the answer lies in the sheer cleverness and intellectual effervescence of the participants.5 Austin, Ayer, Berlin and Stuart Hampshire were analytic philosophers of the first rank while other participants such as A. D. Woozley and D. M. MacKinnon appear to have been more than capable of holding their own in quicksilver philosophical debate. Another contributory factor was, no doubt, the distinctive way in which they relentlessly and severely cross-examined topics as well as each other’s views – Berlin recalls that Austin and Ayer ‘were in a state of almost continuous collision’ – which partly mirrors the Socratic method of argument with its emphasis on the unsparing, critical examination of our everyday beliefs and assumptions. Yet where Socrates and his interlocutors posed questions such as ‘What is piety?’ (Euthyphro), ‘What is justice?’ (Republic) or ‘What is knowledge?’ (Theaetetus), Austin and his interlocutors were more concerned with raising what look like  more esoteric philosophical questions, ranging from the nature of perception and our knowledge of other minds to the meaning and use of such concepts as truth, personal identity, free will and so forth. It is worth mentioning here that the tendency to drift away from what many would regard as the central questions of philosophy (and of human life) towards more abstract and seemingly 5  Berlin kept a large cardboard cut-out of an Austin car on his mantelpiece with an inscription below: ‘Watch out or Austin will overtake ya.’ See, Lendrum, Ann, ‘Remembering J. L. Austin’ in Brian Garvey ed., J.L. Austin on Language (2014: Palgrave, Basingstoke), xxii. Stuart Hampshire also made a similar point in his tribute to Austin:

I think there is more to be learnt from him than from any other philosopher of his generation. He had an entirely original and unprejudiced mind, a very strong instrument of natural scholarship, and serious and generous purposes. He was certainly the cleverest man that I have known among teachers of philosophy. He made a contribution, which was entirely his own, to one particular strand in English thought, and the consequences of his work will remain a living issue. Stuart Hampshire’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LX (1959–60), 2–14. Bernard Williams held a very different view of Austin’s philosophical distinction, claiming that his zealous efforts to eliminate the alleged metaphysical excesses of British philosophy amounted to tilting at windmills: ‘He always seemed to me like a Treasury official who thought that the British economy needed deflating, when there were already three million unemployed.’ Andrew Pyle ed. Key Philosophers in Conversations: The Cogito Interviews (1999: Routledge, London), 143.

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peripheral themes is a common and perhaps even inevitable feature of genuine philosophical discussion. A regrettable feature of the increasingly chronic professionalisation of philosophy is that its practitioners fail to explain how their highly specialised inquiries connect with the questions that originally attract us to philosophy in the first place. Moreover, they don’t appear to appreciate that they are engaged in an enquiry that forms an integral part of a single subject called philosophy. A final point worth highlighting is the evident intellectual pleasure and benefit that this All Souls group derived from their weekly conversations, the recollections of which are a testament to the intense delight and esprit de corps to be had from engaging in vigorous philosophical dialogue with informed and engaged interlocutors. They exemplify the truth of Plato’s argument in the Phaedrus that the written word is no substitute for the free and unpredictable cut and thrust of open-minded and open-ended conversation: the best written speeches have really acted as a reminder to those who know; that it is only in teaching, in things that are spoken by way of education and truly written in the soul concerning what is clear and complete and worth taking seriously to be found; that speeches of this kind should be spoken as if they were the writer’s legitimate sons  – first and foremost the speech within him. (Phaedrus 278E)

Unsurprisingly, the differences between Socrates and his modern philosophical heirs in mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge did not end in their choice of questions. The most significant contrast, and the one that goes a long way to explaining the radical nature and immense impact of the new genre of philosophy, centres on the distinctive approach that Austin and others, including the later Wittgenstein in Cambridge, applied to philosophical questions.6 They referred to this method as linguistic analysis. It stood for a particular philosophical approach that could be deployed in the various branches of the subject as well as in other fields of human enquiry. Linguistic analysis is not to be confused with the philosophy of language, which is a specific branch of philosophy concerned with the relationship between language and reality. Linguistic or conceptual analysis is a technique of philosophy, a particular way of doing philosophy rather than a 6  See David Pears, ‘Wittgenstein and Austin’ in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore eds., British Analytical Philosophy ((1966: Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), for an excellent account of what made their conceptions of philosophy similar to and different from those of Socrates and Plato.

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domain of the discipline. Seeing philosophy as a method rather than a subject matter or set of doctrines was the defining element of the genre of ordinary language philosophy which dominated the Anglophone world between the early 1950s and mid-1970s. It is an account of philosophy that sees itself predominantly, if not entirely, as a sedulous clarifier and elucidator of our everyday concepts and language-­use rather than as a source of substantive, edifying wisdom. It is also one that seeks to reconnect philosophy with the ordinary, earthbound world of everyday human meaning rather than preoccupies itself with the search for some transcendent but non-existent meaning and truth. Austin and his acolytes argued that the traditional problems of philosophy could be solved or would effectively dissolve once the ambiguities and mishandling of ordinary language were diagnosed and removed by the application of the technique of linguistic analysis. So not only did philosophy not need to look beyond language to perform its task, it wasn’t required to concern itself with more than the everyday meaning and use of ordinary language to fulfil its remit since a proper understanding of everyday language would disclose or rather attest to the real and necessarily practical meaning of language and how it is used in our day-to-day social interaction: ‘[O]ur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have worth drawing, and the conexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method.7

The Linguistic Method At first glance, the method of linguistic analysis can appear deceptively similar to the Socratic elenchus, the technique of dialectical cross-­ examination. In common with Socrates and Plato, Austin and his colleagues felt that it was only by subjecting our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous and relentless analysis that we could discover what, if anything, they actually mean and tell us about the world. Where they diverge from 7   J.  L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’ in his Philosophical Papers, J.O.  Urmson and G.J. Warnock, eds. (1961: 3rd ed. 1979: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 182. Austin’s Philosophical Papers are hereafter referred to as APP3.

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one another, however, is in their view of the type of analysis best suited to treating philosophical problems and propositions. Typically, a middle and late Platonic dialogue seeks to produce a definitive account of a general concept such as justice or knowledge (as distinct from an early Platonic dialogue which is preoccupied with prompting Socratic or profound ignorance).8 The assumption underlying these ancient dialogues is that there is some essential, non-subjective property that a concept like justice, knowledge or courage possesses and that without discovering what this essential property or set of properties consists in, we are left, philosophically speaking, whistling in the wind. For how can we determine whether a person is really just, knowledgeable or courageous unless we know what these concepts or virtues objectively are in the first place? A crucial element here isn’t just the belief that there is something that all genuine instances of such concepts have in common but the more fundamental idea that their essence has an existence beyond mere words and particular beliefs. Our language tracks reality – or in Plato’s case what he calls the ‘Forms’ – not the other way around. So, for example, when Plato proposed the existence of necessary truths, such as the truths of Euclidean geometry, he claimed that these truths are true even though there are no perfect empirical instances of them. He thought there existed a network of general ‘Forms’ which he believed extended beyond mathematical concepts to epistemic and normative entities such as Knowledge, Justice, Courage, Piety, Love and so forth. This idea that there is something above and beyond our language which objectively validates our thoughts has proved enormously powerful in the Western philosophical tradition (and enjoyed a major and unexpected renewal in 1970 with the appearance of Saul Kripke’s series of lectures under the title ‘Naming and Necessity’). The philosophers who converged around Wittgenstein and Austin (remarkably, both thinkers, as well as Gilbert Ryle, worked independently of each other even though their philosophical ideas have a great deal in common) between the mid-1930s and 1950s took a drastically different view of language and its relation to the philosophical enterprise. Unlike Plato and his successors, they shared the belief that the analysis of language 8  The early Platonic dialogues capture the outlook of the historical Socrates (rather than the Platonic Socrates of the middle and later dialogues) suggest that while infallible and certain knowledge in relation to ‘What is X?’ type-questions is unavailable, it is possible to have ‘elenctic knowledge’ which is the kind of Socratic knowledge that survives dialogic cross-examination. See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY), 3.

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provided the key to philosophical insight. They argued that linguistic analysis provided the indispensable method of treating the propositions of philosophy, including those concerning its age-old questions such as, ‘What is truth?’, ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is number?’, ‘What is morality?’ and so forth. Indeed, a great deal of the attraction of the new linguistic school of philosophy was that it offered the promise not so much of answering but of deflating philosophy’s so-called timeless and inescapable questions. Their approach represented a continuation of but also a radical deviation from the assumptions underpinning the analytic tradition founded by Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein. Like their immediate analytic predecessors, they continued to put language at the centre of the philosophical project. They also believed, as we’ve indicated, that the point of philosophy is found in its method rather than its subject matter  – they believed that much of its traditional subject matter is empty or nonsensical. But the linguistic philosophers had a very different view of how language works with the result that they had a fundamentally different account of what philosophy’s business is. Where their analytic predecessors saw language as a means of discovering how its logical structure corresponds (or fails to correspond) to  the non-linguistic reality of the world, they saw language as both a reflection of and a window into our everyday, shared world. They supplanted the picture theory of meaning associated with the early Wittgenstein in which cognitively meaningful language pictures or mirrors the objects of the world with a very different conception which views language in terms of how it is employed and functions in the actual stream of human life. Hence the later Wittgenstein’s statement: ‘What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.’9 There is a sense, therefore, in which linguistic philosophers sought to restore the concrete world by recasting the task of philosophy as primarily concerned with elucidating the everyday meaning and use of language. Philosophy was being brought home as it were. The result wasn’t just a transformation of how we conceive the nature and scope of language and philosophy but, more broadly, of how we understand our world or, again, what the later Wittgenstein called our ‘form of life’.10 The key change or ‘revolution’ to register here is not that words all of a sudden had become 9  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, P.M.S.  Hacker and Joachim Schulte eds. (2009 ed.: Blackwell, Oxford), Paragraph 116. 10  The question of the scope of ‘forms of life’ was left ambiguous by Wittgenstein. This leaves us with at least two problems: firstly, the issue of the extent to which different forms of life are mutually intelligible and, secondly, the question of the extent to which they are hermeneutically and evaluatively comparable.

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important to philosophy but a systematic understanding of the ways in which we use them in our day-to-day lives had become the central and sufficient goal of philosophy. This is clearly a very different conception of philosophy to the one Ayer held. It rejects the relatively narrow, scientistic view of the subject which is encapsulated in Quine’s memorable phrase that ‘philosophy of science is philosophy enough’. Instead, it argues that the meaningfulness of language, and by extension thought, is principally determined not by its capacity to correspond to the world but rather by the various and varying ways in which it discloses the nature of the everyday, shared human world.11 We turn from a straightforwardly representational to a more phenomenological conception of philosophy. The challenge of course now becomes how does philosophy fulfil its new self-understanding. Ayer’s conception of philosophy may be crudely reductive but it does have the virtue of being clear and precise. The ordinary language conception of philosophy may open up new and liberating possibilities, but it is hardly self-evident what meaningful role, if any, philosophy has in pursuing them and what philosophical success might look like. As we have noted above, one of the more conspicuous features of philosophy’s endless preoccupation with life’s big questions is the absence of a single, universally accepted and authoritative answer to any of them. This intriguing or scandalous vista – depending on one’s standpoint and intellectual temperament – was not lost on Austin or Berlin, though they viewed its significance in radically different ways. Where Berlin regarded the recalcitrance of philosophical problems as a defining characteristic of the subject, Austin clung to the prospect that many of philosophy’s problems are, in principle, if not in practice, soluble (or dissoluble). We shall discuss Berlin’s contrasting attitude to philosophy shortly, but for now we shall focus on Austin’s more sanguine view of the matter since it provides a way of getting a clearer grasp of his elusive conception of philosophy. Austin’s optimism about the solubility (and dissolubility) of philosophy’s questions was based on his belief in the power of the method of linguistic analysis or what he preferred to describe as ‘linguistic phenomenology’.(APP3 182)12 He felt that the linguistic method had the potential to produce philosophical progress in two distinct and powerful ways.  W. V. Quine, ‘Mr Strawson on Logical Theory’, Mind 62, (1953), 433–51.  Paul Grice referred to Austin’s method admiringly as ‘linguistic botanizing’. See H. P. Grice ‘Reply to Richards’, in R. E. Grany and R. Warners eds., Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (1986: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 57. 11 12

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In the first instance, it could be deployed negatively to eliminate the thick fog of muddle and confusion caused by our imprecise and careless use of language. Austin appears to have taken to heart Thomas Reid’s (1710–1796) celebrated remark that ‘There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge that the ambiguity of words.’13 He was convinced that the application of sober and scrupulous analysis, clarification and elucidation of key concepts in our day-to-day language would expose the largely philosophical misuse of language which has left us floundering in a virtual Tower of Babel. The philosophical impulse to assume profound meaning and unity where they don’t and can’t exist is, according to Austin, as irresistible as it is erroneous. One of the major insights that emerges from his brand of linguistic phenomenology is a realisation that several of the perennial problems of philosophy do not so much get resolved as simply disappear. So, for example, when someone asks the question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’, we naively, if naturally, assume that the answer must take a certain very abstract, universal and profound form which invariably presupposes the existence of some intrinsic, if ineffable, non-­linguistic property. In other words, we have let ourselves believe that such questions require a deep and meaningful answer that traditional philosophy (or perhaps theology or some other transcendent mode of thought) is uniquely capable of providing. But to be told instead that ordinary language, by which Austin means philosophically unvarnished language, contains the necessary and sufficient resources to treat such questions strikes many of us as not only wrong but perversely so. And yet it is precisely this reaction which alerts us to one of the paradoxes of philosophy when examined through the very precise and deceptively deflationary lens of linguistic analysis: many of life’s supposedly profound questions end up being manifestations of the distorting effects of the ambiguity and misuse of language. Austin makes this point most emphatically in his paper ‘The Meaning of a Word’, which urges us to give up the habit of asking such general questions as ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ or ‘What is the meaning of any word?’ or ‘What is the meaning of a word in general?’, which he viewed as specimens of nonsense, of what

13  Thomas Reid, ‘Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man’ in his Inquiry and Essays eds. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (1983 ed: Hackett, Indiana), 129. Much of the first chapter of Reid’s marvellous essay on the explication of words prefigures Austin’s abiding concern with attending to the proper meaning and use of words.

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Gilbert Ryle called ‘systematically misleading expressions’.14 He labelled these all too abstract questions pseudo-questions, since they presuppose that words possess some will o’wisp, ineffable meaning, independently of their everyday meaning and use – Austin did not believe of course that concepts could not be defined, just that they needed to be linguistically sound rather than metaphysically loaded (or Platonic) definitions. It is precisely this philosophically generated myth of linguistic essentialism that has prompted us to be led down the well-trodden garden path of empty or senseless metaphysical speculation for far too long. The debunking side of ordinary language philosophy was met with predictable dismissiveness by Austin’s more conservative colleagues and, no doubt, sheer bewilderment by vast majority of those outside the academy who cared to take notice. The reaction of the old philosophical guard tended to coalesce around the conviction that the traditional concerns of philosophy are deeper and more important than anything the arid and condescending scholasticism of linguistic analysis could disclose, let alone resolve. But it was the very sources of this kind of contemptuous reaction that Austin and his followers sought to repudiate. He viewed such defensive incredulity and contempt as a symptom of the power in which language can play tricks on us and one that has been fuelled by various forms of metaphysical speculation. For the basic orientation of the Western philosophical tradition had given the false and misleading impression that the right response to the putatively deep and permanent questions of philosophy requires us, per impossibile, to transcend language, discovering in the process that true knowledge and sweet enlightenment exist in some ineffable, extra-linguistic reality. The negative remit of linguistic philosophy was nothing less than the eradication of what Wittgenstein famously referred to as ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by the resources of our language’.15 Once the thick fog of conceptual ambiguity and metaphysical obscurantism is put through the linguistic sieve, the linguistic phenomenologist can start the second and more constructive task of anchoring philosophy in a much more exact, clear and fine-grained appreciation of everyday language and thought. A crucial feature of the positive side of Austin’s 14  Gilbert Ryle, ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXXII (1931–32), 139–70. 15  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (2009 ed.: Blackwell, Oxford), Paragraph 109.

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pursuit of philosophy is that it does not require us to replace everyday language with some analytically generated Esperanto. On the contrary, as we observed above, Austin is fundamentally a friend rather than a foe of plain, ordinary words, seeing them in quasi-Darwinian terms as survivors deserving more respect than not. Austin did not share the later Wittgenstein’s austere view that philosophy’s principal, and possibly sole, purpose is the negative one of curing us of philosophical bewilderment: for Wittgenstein, the task of philosophy is basically therapeutic, concerned with disclosing the metaphysical nonsense latent in its own grand theories and assumptions which have also infected our understanding and use of ordinary language.16 Austin felt that philosophy is capable of being more than the treatment of its own disease, of merely removing what Wittgenstein called ‘the fly from the fly bottle’. Philosophy, properly pursued, also has the capacity to perform a more productive role in offering a perspicacious account of the world and our relation to it. But Austin’s more constructive, if piecemeal, conception of philosophy’s role was never fully defined, let alone fulfilled, and remains a matter of debate to this day – this outcome was not helped by his premature death a month before his forty-ninth birthday in 1960. Indeed, Austin’s early death left a question mark over his philosophical legacy that remains largely unanswered. As John Passmore declared at the time in his account of twentieth-century philosophy: Even among his closest associates, however, there is more than a little controversy about what Austin was trying to do and its relevance to the traditional pursuits of philosophy.17

The distinctiveness of Austin’s way of doing philosophy is partly explained by the fact that he came to the subject from a background in 16  The matter of whether Wittgenstein held an exclusively negative view of philosophy’s task remains moot. For an excellent discussion of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy which makes a powerful case that he felt that philosophy could perform a more constructive role than the purely therapeutic one of disabusing us of our philosophical confusions and anxieties, see Anthony Kenny, ‘Wittgenstein on the nature of philosophy’ in Brian McGuinness, ed., Wittgenstein and his Times (1982: Blackwell, Oxford). Kenny’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy is echoed and developed in characteristically original and interesting ways by Barry Stroud in his paper, ‘What is Philosophy?’ in C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt eds. What is Philosophy? (2001; Yale University Press, New Haven), 25–46. 17  John Passmore, One Hundred Years of Philosophy (1968 ed: Penguin, London), 450.

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classics rather than science or mathematics. What he thought was discoverable from his meticulous and microscopic linguistic investigations is that the meaning and everyday use of words are far richer and more telling than the tradition of Western philosophy has assumed. Moreover, he felt that it was only by carrying out such minute and detailed studies of specific but revealing features of everyday discourse that genuine insight and cumulative progress could be accomplished. As he himself said, his way of doing philosophy may not be the ‘end-all of philosophy, but it is the begin-all.’ He also believed that the project of ferreting out the ambiguities in our language that are particularly implicated in intractable philosophical problems lends itself to collaboration among philosophers rather than being pursued solo from one’s armchair. He was of the view that the prospect of philosophical progress would be greatly enhanced if linguistic analyses was pursued in a concerted effort by teams of like-­ minded linguistic botanists, just as most scientific progress has been made as a result of scientific working together in their laboratories on specific projects and problems. It is not too fanciful to suppose that Austin’s wartime experience of leading a team, which had a crucial intelligence role in the preparation of D-Day during the Second World War, was far from his mind in his later thoughts concerning the optimal conditions for philosophical advancement. Austin ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel and received decorations for his distinguished services from the French (Croix de Guerre), Americans (Officer of the Legion of Merit) and the British (OBE, Military). It was said of him that ‘he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day Intelligence.’ It might be helpful at this point if we give a flavour of what an Austinian linguistic investigation looks like in concreto and, let it tamper with our beliefs a little. Austin’s more well-known paper ‘A Plea for Excuses’ provides a representative illustration of his way of pursuing philosophy. In line with the rest of Austin’s writings, the typically phlegmatic and unportentous sounding title can mislead us into thinking that it contains nothing very interesting or untrivial.18 Yet by the end of its opening paragraph, it is obvious that we are in the company of a prodigiously sharp and magnetic intelligence which is preoccupied with concrete and difficult human questions. Austin’s aim is nothing less than getting to grips with 18  Austin’s shorter essay ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink’ should be read alongside ‘A Plea for Excuses’ as it covers much of the same territory and illuminates key aspects of his longer and more influential paper.

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the central question of the scope of human freedom. So why, one may ask, does he not call his paper ‘On Freedom’? The reason lies in the fact that Austin accepted Aristotle’s claim that an understanding of freedom requires a prior grasp of the concept of responsibility and he argued that we cannot determine if someone is responsible unless we can say that they are not acting by mistake or under duress or by accident and so forth. This, finally, leads him to a consideration of excuses since excuses are typically what we give or appeal to when want to show that we do not act responsibly and freely. Hence the title of his paper, ‘A Plea for Excuses’. After highlighting the potential ‘snags’ that can hinder us from correctly identifying how our everyday use of the term excuse can shed light on our grasp of moral thought and conduct, he recommends three initial resources to help us proceed with our linguistic inquiries, namely, a dictionary to list all the words that seem applicable to excuse, the law for a ‘immense miscellany of untoward cases’ together with ‘a useful list of recognized pleas’ and finally, psychology under which he includes anthropology. Armed with these resources and ‘with the aid of the imagination’, the linguistic philosopher ‘can begin to comprehend clearly much that, before, [he] only made use of ad hoc.’ The remainder of the paper is taken up mainly with fleshing out the various philological and conceptual lessons that result from applying the analytic tools of the linguistic trade to the relevant data. These tools or heuristics include the principle ‘no modification without aberration’, which warns against the distortions which often result from adding an adverb to an expression, to the application of more self-­explanatory principles including ‘the importance of negations and opposites’, ‘the exact phrase and its place in the sentence’, ‘small distinctions, and big too’ (the paper includes Austin’s celebrated discussion of shooting a donkey to bring out the subtle distinction between doing something ‘by mistake’ and doing it ‘by accident’). Austin was particularly wary of philosophically generated distinctions such as those between empirical and logical truths or between emotive and descriptive language which he felt do not do justice either to the specific context and circumstantial nuance of the way words are used in everyday language or to the relevance of what he calls ‘trailing clouds of etymology’. By the end of the paper the reader is left with a much keener and more concrete grasp of what is involved in giving a properly conceptual account of a deceptively straightforward term like ‘excuse’, a recognition of the different types of excuses that are available to us and what their different meanings and (mis)uses tell us about the complex reality of individual freedom and personal responsibility. We are

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alerted to the complicated dimensions of the elasticity and opacity of our concepts of responsibility and freedom, to the various types of excuse that are available to us to help compensate for our failure to perform the more official and formally articulated expectations and duties of personal responsibility and freedom, duties that our norms and institutions, especially our legal ones, are prone to exaggerating our ability to fulfil. Austin reminds us of how our fortunes can be and are determined by the use and, more relevantly, misuse of words by referring to a particular legal case from 1874 involving a death in a lunatic asylum in which the validity of a defendant’s case hangs on the meaning and use of words that relate directly to Austin’s discussion of excuses.19 The overall effect of reading ‘A Plea for Excuses’ is that it impels us not to look beyond words and language for meaning but to sharpen our perception of what they are actually doing in our day-to-day lives and interactions and, very importantly for Austin, the nature and causality of what they frequently fail to do. Indeed, Austin is more often than not preoccupied with how and why our language fails us and our consequent vulnerability as supposedly free and rational agents. He raises our consciousness about the centrality of words by highlighting their ubiquitous yet imprecisely understood presence and power in our lives and, as a result, makes us aware of the need to be intensely, self-consciously vigilant about our use and misuse of language, about when words helps us and when they fail us and, finally, what we might do to address these failings and thereby mitigate our self-deception and fragility. But what general lessons are we to derive from such linguistic investigations? There are, I think, several themes of a representative nature that can be distilled from Austin’s paper. The first is the deceptively restricted scope of his philosophical analysis which was a very deliberate move on Austin’s part. It reflected his assumption that the only way to make whatever progress is possible from philosophical thought is to consider key aspects of our language in bite-size chunks, permitting the thorough analysis, clarification and taxonomy of particular and often troublesome words, what he sometimes called ‘trouser-words’ and ‘adjuster-words’ such as ‘real’ 19  The case in question is Regina v. Finney, Shrewsbury Assizes 1874 in which Finney, the defendant, was accused of the manslaughter of a lunatic, Thomas Watkins, in his care. Austin remarks that Finney, who was found not guilty of the charge of manslaughter, gave a far more unambiguous and competent account of his actions (Austin describes Finney as ‘an evident master of the Queen’s English) than either his counsel or the judge managed to accomplish in their presentations. Austin and his Oxford colleague, H. L. A. Hart would refer to this case in a class they jointly gave at Oxford after the war.

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‘good’, ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’, ‘excuses’, ‘pretending’, ‘responsibility’ and so forth. This painstaking and piecemeal approach was motivated as much by the desire to avoid repeating previous philosophical mistakes as it is by the goal of reaching a better understanding of our shared world through a surer grasp of our language use. His treatment of the concept of freedom in ‘A Plea for Excuses’ shows that our thoughts about crucial ideas are far from perspicacious but that registering the vagueness and ambiguity of our language, especially of concepts such as ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’, ‘excuse’ and the relations between helps us to recognise and resolve our misunderstandings. And one of the ways we can improve our understanding is by sidestepping the conceptual sins of the past which continue to contaminate clear thinking. Austin was determined not to repeat the errors of inflated, obscure and ‘chuckleheaded’ speculative visions that fatally infected vast swathes of philosophical speculation. The secret to steady and cumulative philosophical progress lies in initiating conceptually manageable and sanctionable steps in much the same way as the solving of a complex crime requires a methodical analysis of the scope and background of a case combined with a judicious, careful weighing of the forensic evidence. One false or careless move can irreparably subvert the entire investigation. But unlike a police inspector, who can at least reasonably expect, if not guarantee, that a crime scene is preserved and the pertinent evidence uncontaminated, a philosopher can’t even entertain such hopes. Rather he has no choice but to grapple with a mainly adulterated linguistic crime scene, otherwise known as ordinary language, and do his best from such an unpromising starting-position. But the challenge for the philosopher is not impossible since we are capable of solving the linguistic crimes we are responsible for committing. According to Austin, it really is feasible to reform the philosophically-­ motivated mishandling of words as well as our more general, non-­ theoretically generated carelessness with language through applying the techniques of linguistic philosophy – Austin did not believe that competent language users are limited to linguistically trained analytic philosophers nor did he believe that all lapses in competent language use are a consequence of bad philosophical thinking. For once we devote sufficient time and effort to ‘hounding down the minutiae’ of language and to resisting the temptations of excessive simplification, hasty generalisation and over-reaching dichotomies, he argues, we are likely to (re)discover the

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sense and significance of everyday language, of appreciating the truth of Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’20 It wasn’t for nothing that Gilbert Ryle referred to Austin as ‘the protector of maltreated nuances and the stamp-collector of idioms.’21 Austin’s way of inspecting what he perceived as the endless depth, shades of meaning and elasticity of everyday language demonstrated that the skills required of a philosopher go well beyond those of a competent lexicographer or philologist. His unfailingly subtle studies exemplify an ingenious and fastidious mind at work, the product of an intellect that did not merely display the qualities one associates with high intelligence – clarity, subtlety, exactness, unpretentiousness – but exhibited a range of knowledge as well as an inventive brilliance that is inimitable. This latter point is important since it suggests a deeper continuity between Austin and Socrates. Both personified a more profound truth about philosophy; that it is essentially an activity rather than a set of fixed beliefs, an intensely reflective and personal process which can only really be carried out when one makes an effort to engage in it oneself: dialectically, tenaciously, creatively, truthfully and, in a way, as if one’s life depended on it. What their shared example also shows is that those who have tried to imitate them invariably emerge a very poor second, at best. A second and related point is the notion that since ordinary language provides the raw material for philosophy, we would do well to harvest it with the patience and care it has earned over time. Resisting the philosophical habit of thinking that words and language have meanings above and beyond how we ordinarily use them in our daily lives requires a selfconsciously strenuous effort to say what we mean and mean what we say in the most astringent, lucid and unambiguous manner that plain, metaphysically uninfected language permits. One of the important ways that Austin’s assiduous investigations fulfil this effort is by awakening us to 20  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Section 43. Gilbert Ryle vividly conveyed this aspect of language by arguing that it is as futile to try to understand the major concepts of our language independently of looking at how they operate in our language as it is to understand the proper meaning and purpose of coins in a museum, removed as they are from the world of commerce and trade. Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, vol.1 (1971: Hutchinson, London), 185. 21  Gilbert Ryle, review of K. T. Fann, ed. Symposium on J. L. Austin (1969: Routledge, London) in The Listener, 5 March 1970, Vol.83, Issue 2136.

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the conditioning character of language itself. Moreover, since meaning is use, we must keep ourselves on the deep surface of language and resist the temptation of seeking subterranean meanings where they don’t exist. In this respect, Austin’s common-sense sympathies can be regarded as very much in sync with the demotic and un-metaphysical zeitgeist of the time. It wasn’t only that he wished to restore faith in the value of everyday discourse but that he delighted in puncturing the pomposity and emptiness of highfalutin talk. In a way, he fulfilled the philosophical equivalent of the mid-century literary Movement that we associate with writers such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis: where Larkin’s poetry managed to be poetic without being self-consciously Poetic, Austin’s style of philosophy mirrored the non-pompous, sturdily earthbound mode of clear, unpretentious, vernacular speech – albeit, in an exact, dry and economical form (which, of course is very far from the norm of everyday speech).22 Another noteworthy ingredient of Austin’s conception of philosophy is hinted at by his intriguing reference to ‘trailing clouds of etymology’. What he means by this quasi-Wordsworthian phrase is that when we are analysing and using a concept such as ‘excuse’, which in turn brings us in direct contact with other slippery concepts such as cause, effect, motive, responsibility, freedom we need to be particularly sensitive to two factors. The first is the etymology of a particular word and an acknowledgment that concepts like cause and effect can remain semantically constant even though they almost inevitably acquire fresh and even incommensurable meanings over time. How we interpret and use a word like cause today and how earlier epochs referred to it or its semantic antecedent is most likely to have changed and, perhaps, radically so. The second and more fundamental point is that previous ‘models’ or patterns of thought have an enduring impact on our comprehension and application of everyday words, especially semantically pregnant and frequently misleading words such as effect, action and cause. The rich ambiguity of such words 22  For an account of the continuities between the literary movement of the 1950s and the linguistic genre of philosophy of the same period, see Colin McGinn ‘Philosophy and Literature in the 1950s: the rise of the ‘Ordinary Bloke’ ‘in Zachary Leader ed., The Movement Reconsidered: essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie (2009: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 123–38. It is worth highlighting that Austin and Amis shared a fastidious respect for language which testifies to their common conviction that the misuse of language reflects muddled or imprecise thought; careless writing was not just bad manners but disrespectful of and detrimental to the truth.

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confirms the heterogeneity of language and the vestigial impression that historical and cultural factors play in framing their meaning and situating their use. The ‘snag’ to watch out for here is that we often use a word such as, for example, cause in a way that reflects an historically earlier and usually more primitive form of life or world view than our putatively more complex and sophisticated contemporary models of understanding and explanation. Austin then makes a very profound point that is worth quoting in full: There is too another danger in words that invoke models, half-forgotten or not. It must be remembered that there is no necessity whatsoever that the various models used in creating our vocabulary, primitive or recent, should all fit together neatly as parts into one single, total model or scheme of, for instance, the doing of actions. It is possible, or indeed highly likely, that our assortment of models will include some, or many, that are overlapping, conflicting, or more generally simply disparate. (APP3 203)

The acknowledgment that the meaning of words, especially value-laden concepts and categories, is imbued with largely implicit, context-dependent and occasionally forgotten assumptions, deriving in many cases from neglected, anachronistic or occluded models of thought is something that Austin tended to register rather than explore in any great detail. As we shall see, Berlin recognised and amplified the significance of the historical and cultural contingency of language and thought and their intimate relation to the history of ideas and contemporary political theory. A final element of Austin’s philosophical outlook worth singling out is not especially pronounced in ‘A Plea for Excuses’. I am referring to Austin’s theory of speech acts. My reason for raising it here is because it reflects an important feature of his metaphilosophy, one that contrasts sharply with the narrowly scientific conception of philosophy advocated by A.  J. Ayer. The core point revolves around Austin’s idea, formulated in How to Do Things with Words (1962), that language can be used to perform an act, that is, a speech act  and not merely describe reality. Austin was interested in the way that words can literally make things happen, that is, words as literally deeds: the set of lectures Austin gave in Oxford after the war and which formed the basis of his Williams James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955 went under the title ‘‘Words and Deeds’. Austin’s understanding of language contrasts sharply with the logical positivist view put forward by Ayer (and early Wittgenstein) that the sense of a proposition

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depends on whether it represents reality. As we saw in the previous chapter, Ayer’s highly reductive view of meaning resulted in vast domains of human discourse and experience being categorised as strictly nonsense, including all evaluative beliefs and judgments. Austin disagreed intensely with Ayer – Berlin recalls that ‘Ayer was like an irresistible missile, Austin like an immovable obstacle’ during their weekly meetings – arguing that to define the role of language exclusively or even primarily in terms of describing reality is to fall victim to what he called ‘the descriptive fallacy’ (APP3 103). In contrast, Austin was keen to highlight, among other things, the performative role of language, that is, statements in which we do something  – such as, make a promise  – rather than describe a state of affairs. What he has in mind here are performative utterances that are not, strictly speaking, true or false but are perfectly legitimate and common aspects of language use. Examples of performance utterances or speech acts mentioned by Austin in How to Do Things with Words include: ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’.23 We shall be returning to Austin’s theory of speech acts in Chap. 5 when we examine Quentin Skinner’s application of his theory to the task of recuperating the historical identity and meaning of the works of long-­dead political thinkers. For now it is sufficient to register that Austin’s emphasis on the existence and significance of speech acts demonstrates both a rejection of the narrowly positivist model of philosophy and  its exclusive preoccupation with an representationalist paradigm of language and an affirmation of a non-descriptive or performative theory of language which denies that the sole or principal goal of language is to represent the world. As he says in his paper ‘Other Minds’: To suppose that ‘I know’ is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. Utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it. (“I do”). (APP3 103)

23  J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962: 1975 ed.: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 5. I should like to record my debt to Sandra Laugier’s excellent paper ‘‘The Vulnerability of Reality: Austin, Normativity and Excuses’ in Savas L.  Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J.  L. Austin: Critical Essays (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 119–42.

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Some of the most vital lessons of philosophy (and of life) are negative ones and if Austin has helped to disabuse us of the madness of trying to find uniquely correct and general definitions of concepts, then his achievement should not be underestimated. Philosophy’s record of inhibiting us from barking up the wrong tree is a noble one, a much-­ needed prophylactic against intellectual pretentiousness and muddle. In ‘A Plea for Excuses’ Austin makes the following remark: When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings”, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about … (APP3 182)

But it seems ‘the realities we use the words to talk about’ do not always lend themselves to straightforward linguistic analysis and conceptual clarification. What is most remarkable about Austin’s insight into this pluralist point is not that he discovered it but that that he limited his remarks about it to the final footnote in ‘A Plea for Excuses’: This is by way of a general warning in philosophy. It seems to be too readily assumed that if we can only discover the true meanings of each of a cluster of terms, usually historic terms, that we use in some particular field (as, for example, ‘right’, ‘good’, and the rest in morals), then it must without question transpire that each will fit into place in some single, interlocking, consistent conceptual scheme. Not only is there no reason to assume this, but all historical probability is against it, especially in the case of language derived from such various civilizations as ours is. We may cheerfully use, and with weight, terms which are not so much head-on incompatible as simply disparate, which just do not fit in or even on. Just as we cheerfully subscribe to, or have the grace to be torn between, simply disparate ideals – why must there be a conceivable amalgam, the Good Life for Man? (APP3 203)

The acuteness of Austin’s comments is especially germane in relation to the more normative and hotly debated concepts that inform several of the major questions of philosophy such as ‘How should one live one’s life?’, ‘Is morality an objective or subjective matter?’, ‘Am I truly free and does it matter?’, ‘What defines a just society?’ or ‘What is the meaning of life?’ and so forth. But it is surely also the case that addressing these questions, several of which may present themselves as pseudo- or nonsense-questions from Austin’s standpoint, cannot be achieved by a fundamentally

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unhistorical or contextless form of purely descriptive, value-free linguistic analysis. These questions assume and rely on normative presuppositions and commitments, in fact, entire frames of reference, that are unsusceptible to the kind of determinately piecemeal and normatively-neutral treatment that ordinary language philosophy typically adopted.24 For one of the most serious blindspots  of the more narrowly absolutist strain of Oxford ordinary language philosophy is the assumption that linguistic analysis constitutes the method for treating the problems of philosophy. Austin himself only occasionally signed up to the more purest  strain of linguistic philosophy. It tended to converge on the view that, all else being equal, philosophy would soon end up being a largely self-curing discipline in which its fundamental questions evaporate under the rigorous diagnosis and treatment of conceptual clarification and analysis. The more doctrinaire disciples of linguistic philosophy conformed to the profile of what one recent philosopher has described as the ‘Brave New World model of philosophy’ in which a ‘new method or discovery gives us a completely new access to philosophical truth in a way that has never been given before.’25 There was a very real expectation among those who fell under the spell of linguistic philosophy that it was only a matter of time before the traditional problems of philosophy would be solved or dissolved. But Austin tended to avoid making such radical and sweeping claims on behalf of his philosophical approach and showed a preparedness to go no further than suggest that linguistic philosophy constituted a necessary but not a sufficient method for the resolution of philosophy’s questions. As he remarked: ‘…certainly ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word. (APP3 185)

24  See John Gray’s paper ‘On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts’ which expands and enriches W. B. Gallie’s original work on the topic of essentially contested concepts, especially in its emphasis on the crucial fact that not all societies have essentially contested concepts, namely, highly traditional and closed forms of society while forms of life that do possess essentially contested concepts of social and political thought are likely ‘to occur in a social environment marked by profound diversity and moral individualism.’ John Gray, ‘On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts’, Political Theory, 1977, Vol. 5, 331–348. 25  Peter Simons ‘The Four Phases of Philosophy’ The Monist, 83, (2000): 68–88.

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Austin was simply too worldly-wise and too authentic a philosopher to accept the simplifying tendencies that the less acute and talented janitors of his own philosophical outlook exhibited. There is a deeper element informing Austin’s view of philosophy which is sceptical of all forms of monistic thinking, including those linguistic philosophers which declared the end of philosophy  was within reach. This underlying feature of his thought, his unflinching refusal to make things less complicated than they manifestly and objectively are, is nicely expressed in the final paragraph of ‘Performative Utterances’: It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way, one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation. (AA2 252)

Austin’s pithy observation about the vocation of linguistic philosophy (and the limitations of philosophers) provides a timely segue into a consideration of Berlin’s understanding of the subject. Berlin was intimately familiar with the finer points and techniques of linguistic analysis and acknowledged its undeniable value as a conceptual tool in removing layers of confusion in our treatment of philosophical issues. Indeed, he very much shared Austin’s view that the linguistic turn had the power to weed out the metaphysical excesses and conceptual obscurities that blighted so much philosophical speculation for far too long. But he did not share Austin’s belief in the power of ordinary language philosophy to solve or dissolve, in any kind of substantial way, the deeper and more recalcitrant problems of philosophy. Where Austin was haunted by the persistence of certain philosophical questions which he felt was unbecoming and eminently fixable, Berlin considered the intransigence of such questions as proof of philosophy’s enduring vitality. For Berlin, the problems of philosophy defined its subject matter and their enduringness testified to its distinctive  character. To argue that these questions are pseudo questions because they do not escape the mesh of conventional linguistic analysis reveals more about the superficiality of the linguistic method than about the validity of the questions themselves. Working out why Berlin believed this is intimately related to Austin’s under-explored insight that our everyday language is shaped by the largely implicit, evolving and malleable patterns of thought. For Berlin, Immanuel Kant provided the key to explaining the recalcitrance of philosophical problems and led him to conceive philosophy as a kind of deep and boundless

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anthropology. The chief lesson he took from Kant is that the fundamental purpose of philosophy is to unearth the often hidden and non-static patterns and presuppositions of our mental world which mould our more explicit and concrete views of the world and ourselves. He believed this task can never be brought to a complete and permanent end since we can only ever attain an imperfect grasp of the underlying categories and concepts of our mental furniture; they are not only abstract, opaque and fluid but they also vary and change across time and space giving rise to new questions or new versions of older questions in multifarious and unpredictable ways26: Its [philosophy’s] subject matter is to a large degree not the items of experience, but the ways in which they are viewed, the permanent or semi-­ permanent categories in terms of which experience is conceived and classified. Purpose versus mechanical causality; organism versus mere amalgams; systems versus mere togetherness; spatio-temporal order versus timeless being; duty versus appetite; value versus fact – these are categories, models, spectacles. Some of these are as old as human experience itself; others are more transient. With the more transient, the philosopher’s problems take on a more dynamic and historical aspect. (CC2 11)

The Implacability of Philosophical Questions In ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’ Berlin provides one of his most vivid accounts of what makes philosophical questions philosophical.27 He argues that there are at least three traits that all genuinely philosophical problems possess. These include: • The absence of any clear and reliable procedure for answering such questions. For example, if someone asks me ‘What time it is?’ then I can simply answer them by consulting my watch or refer them to a nearby clock, but if that person were then to ask me ‘What is time?’, 26  One has only to consider the example of the influence that Freud’s concept of the unconscious has had on our thinking to recognise the porousness, complexity and dynamism of our mental frameworks. 27  Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories, Henry Hardy ed. (1978: 2nd ed. 2013: Princeton University Press, New Jersey). Also relevant in this context is his paper ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’ in the same collection. Hereafter referred to as CC2.

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then I would be at a loss to give them a definitive and demonstrable answer to such a question. Similarly, if I were asked ‘What rights do you enjoy as an Irish citizen?’ I could hazard a rough guess or failing that I could simply consult the relevant constitutional and legal documents whereas if I were asked ‘What is the nature and source of a human right?’ then once again I would be left in a state of severe mental cramp, desperately yet vainly searching for some way of finding the right answer. The difficulty – perhaps even impossibility – of answering these kinds of questions is inseparable from what singles them out as potentially philosophical problems. • Another distinguishing feature of philosophical questions is that they do not belong to one of the two established realms of empirical and exact scientific enquiry, that is, the fields of the factual and the logical sciences. As we noted above, the inductive method will not provide anything close to uniquely uncontroversial answers to the questions of ‘What is time?’ or ‘What is the basis of human rights?’ Nor will the deductive method be of any decisive help, as philosophical questions do not resemble the kind of logical questions that belong to the formal sciences. The deductive method can tell us the cube root of 729 but not ‘What are numbers?’ So, in short, philosophical questions are not the same as the questions of science or logic even though philosophy has an interest in the epistemological, metaphysical, semantic nature and status of science and logic. • A third, more familiar trait of philosophy that Berlin highlights is that its problems tend to be highly abstract and general. For example, in the area of political morality, philosophers are less interested in investigating whether country A is more libertarian or egalitarian or patriotic than country B and more preoccupied with the more general questions of what ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ actually mean and whether one ideal is more valuable than or compatible with another. A related aspect of this trait of philosophy is that many of the ideas and concepts it is concerned with are inescapably value-laden; that is, they presuppose, contain or imply certain evaluative components that partly constitute the concept’s meaning and significance. This is evident in the case of what are referred to as morally thin concepts such as duty, right, wrong, good, bad, obligation, etc. as well as ethically thick concepts such as sincerity, bravery, snobbery, cruelty, mercy, justice and so on. But it is also manifest in relation to intellectual values and virtues such as truth, knowledge, rationality, wisdom,

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objectivity, and, of course, their opposites. A final point worth emphasising here is that the meaning and relevance of our concepts, especially inherently normative ones, change, often radically, over time which helps explain why history and a certain historical self-­ consciousness are indispensable to philosophical thinking. We can now return to the matter of language’s relation to patterns of thought and their pertinence to philosophical reflection. Berlin proved more perceptive and productive than Austin in identifying the broader philosophical range and implications of this relationship. Austin limited his commentary on the matter to less than two pages in ‘A Plea for Excuses’, which, as we have seen, includes a highly perceptive footnote. The brevity of his comments – even for a thinker as dry and unexpansive as Austin – suggests that he may not have appreciated the full significance of his own discovery. In contrast, Berlin hit upon much the same insight and made it a cornerstone of his philosophical vision. It is an intriguing question whether the link between our language and the mainly hidden models of thought that inform and shape it was ever discussed during their pre-war weekly discussions. But whatever the case, Berlin made far more of this insight than Austin. Berlin twigged that our thought and experience are shaped by disparate and often competing frameworks and that several of these frameworks or conceptual schemes are themselves subject to the vicissitudes of historical change  and evolution. An exercise in disinterring the underlying and implicit patterns of thought is necessary to get a handle on the past and present meaning of our concepts. The following passage makes the case for why this excavation work is necessary and why it defines a major part of the domain of philosophical enquiry. The basic categories (with their corresponding concepts) in terms of which we define men – such notions as society, freedom, sense of time and change, suffering, happiness, productivity, good and bad, right and wrong, choice, effort, truth, illusion (to take them wholly at random) – are not matters of induction and hypothesis. To think of someone as a human being is ipso facto to bring all these notions into play; so that to say of someone that he is a man, but that choice, or the notion of truth, mean nothing to him, would be eccentric: it would clash with what we mean by ‘man’ not as a matter of verbal definition (which is alterable at will), but as intrinsic to the

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way in which we think, and (as a matter of ‘brute’ fact) evidently cannot but think. (CC2 217)

This type of investigation was not something that linguistic philosophers typically engaged in when they carried out their analysis and elucidation of concepts. Yet Berlin felt that these underlying, barely understood categories and concepts of thought are a major factor in explaining the source of our failure to produce conclusive and provable answers to philosophy’s most difficult and recalcitrant problems. He also recognised that making sense of our more fundamental concepts requires a historically and contextually grounded form of philosophy which would reveal, at least to some extent, the mainly hidden and evolving mental frameworks that our more explicit concepts, norms, and ideals presuppose and rely on. What are the mental frameworks and weltanschauung that Berlin has in mind? When the theological and metaphysical models of the Middle Ages were swept away by the sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they disappeared largely because they could not compete with new disciplines in describing, predicting, controlling the contents of the external world. To the extent to which man was regarded as an object in material nature the sciences of man – psychology, anthropology, economics, sociology and so on  – began to supplant their theologico-metaphysical predecessors. The questions of the philosophers were affected by this: some were answered or rendered obsolete; but some remained unanswered. The new human sciences studied men’s actual habits; they promised, and in some cases provided, analysis of what men said, wanted, admired, abhorred; they were prepared to supply empirical evidence for this, or experimental demonstrations; but their efforts to solve normative questions of value to questions of fact – of what caused what kind of men to feel or behave as they did in various circumstances. But when Kant or Herder or Dostoevsky or Marx duly rejected the Encyclopedists’ answers, the charge against them was not solely that of faulty observation or invalid inference; it was that of a failure to recognise what it is to be a man, that is, failure to take into account the nature of the framework – the basic categories – in terms of which we think and act and assume to think and act, if communication between us is to work. (CC2 213)

This passage indicates the basis of Berlin’s historical turn and its centrality to his ongoing philosophical explorations. His move from analytic philosophy to the history of ideas after the Second World War should be

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regarded not as an abandonment of philosophy but, on the contrary, as a crucial driver of Berlin’s decision to pursue philosophy in a new key centred on his appropriation of Kant. Berlin’s first move is to register Kant’s central and enduring philosophical achievement.28 He insists on the lasting significance of Kant’s reversal of the relationship between metaphysics and epistemology with his suggestion that the doctrine that ‘all our knowledge must conform to objects’ be replaced by the one that ‘objects must conform to our knowledge’.29 Kant’s literally world-changing insight, of which Berlin identified anticipations in Vico, draws our attention to a crucial distinction between, on the one hand, questions of fact and, on the other, questions about the categories of thought which the data of experience such as things, persons, events present themselves to us.30 This is, of course, Kant’s famous theory of transcendental idealism which is concerned with elucidating the preconditions of human thought and knowledge. Transcendental is crucially  Berlin’s reliance on Kant may seem strange in the context of the anti-metaphysical style of philosophy dominated Oxford in the post-World  War Two period. But, interestingly, Berlin was far from alone in his appreciation of Kant’s critical philosophy. New forms of neo-­ Kantianism were taken up by several analytic philosophers in the 1950s, most notably P. F. Strawson, Jonathan Bennett and Robert Paul Wolff. Like Berlin, these thinkers not only found Kant interesting but, more crucially, basically right about several of the more fundamental aspects of philosophy. 29  Immanuel Kant, Preface to the Second Edition, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (1929: Macmillan, London), B xvi. 30  Berlin felt that Vico’s concept of fantasia amounted to a precursor of Kant’s deployment of the transcendental argument on the grounds that it enables: 28

a kind of transcendental deduction … of historical truth. It is a method of arriving not, as hitherto, at an unchanging reality via its changing appearances, but at a changing reality – men’s history – through its systematically changing modes of expression. (TCE2 15). This view of Vico does not seem far-fetched when one considers the following remark from the third, more ‘sublime’ edition of his New Science (1744): There must in the nature of human institutions be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. The New Science of Giambatista Vico trans. by T.  H. Goddard and M. H. Fisch (1967: Cornel University Press, Ithaca) Section II (Elements), Chapter xxii, paragraph 161.

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distinct from transcendent here since it is focused on the presuppositions of human thought and experience whereas transcendent refers to what lies beyond or independently of human experience. There is the world of objects in themselves, the noumena, which are real but unknowable and the world of phenomena which are the objects of the intelligible world. As Kant himself states: I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.31

Berlin departs, often quite radically, from Kant’s classic transcendental doctrine and method in several key ways, all of which are focused on bringing Kant more down to earth. The first and least radical is the notion that the basic subject matter of philosophy is centrally concerned with an investigation of the underlying and abstract patterns of thought which make our everyday thoughts and experiences about the world possible. The second, which is in stark contrast to Kant’s vision, is that the basic categories and concepts of thought are arrived at inductively rather than deductively. They are, in other words, known through experience rather than arrived at via a priori reasoning or intuition. Berlin does not accept Kant’s idea that our current categories and concepts of thought constitute a conceptually inescapable and unalterable grammar for understanding the world. He thinks that even the most basic elements of our mental frameworks are contingent rather than necessary, though he does accept that certain categories and concepts are less contingently variable than others. In effect, he empiricises Kant’s categories. Next is the idea that philosophy is largely a second-order discipline which is focused on the critical identification and analysis of the preconditions of our experience of the world and ourselves. But, crucially, its parasitic character should not suggest that its enquiries can be pursued in a value-neutral, presuppositionless way since all patterns of thought are still unavoidably ours and many of them are intrinsically normative. The idea that it is possible to produce a purely descriptive, value-free account of the structure of our thought is an illusion since it presumes that we can somehow escape our conceptual skin, that we can transcend the limits of our thought. For Berlin, Kant’s key philosophical legacy is that there is no view from  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (1929: MacMillan, London), A12/13. 31

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nowhere or, at least, not one that we can ourselves are capable of knowing or inhabiting. He articulates his fourth major deviation from Kant in the following terms: Kant, in his doctrine of the our knowledge of the external world, taught that the categories through which we saw it were identical for all sentient beings, permanent and unalterable; indeed this is what made our world one, and communication possible. But some of those who thought about history, morals, aesthetics, did see change and differences; what differed was not so much the empirical content of what these successive civilisations saw or heard or thought as the basic patterns in which they perceived them, the models in terms of which they conceived them, the category-spectacles through which they viewed them. (CC2 10)

It is this historicist insight that proves enormously significant in the genesis and development of Berlin’s thought. While accepting Kant’s basic insight that our grasp of reality is necessarily untranscendent and subject-­ dependent, he diverges from Kant’s view that the categories and concepts of thought that make possible our ordinary thought and experience are immutable and universal in any a priori sense.32 The implication of this 32  It is interesting to note here the similarities and differences between Berlin’s understanding of the underlying concepts and categories of human thought and Strawson’s view of the same or similar territory in his book Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics which was published in 1959. There are several general aspects of Strawson’s arguments that are particularly germane in the context of our discussion. The first is that, like Berlin, Strawson affirms the need to give an account of the basic concepts and categories that are presupposed by and shape our thought, an account that Strawson labels ‘descriptive metaphysics’ as distinct from what he called ‘revisionary metaphysics’ which is the kind of full-blooded metaphysical speculation one typically associates with the great tradition of Western philosophy. He regards the former type of philosophical enquiry to be different from and more fundamental than the type of piecemeal, non-systematic linguistic analysis characteristic of the then dominant Oxford style of philosophy. Another area of similarity between the two thinkers is their shared view that there is a central core of human thinking that is necessary for all human thought, including revisionary metaphysical theories, to get off the ground. Strawson argues that the ‘basic structure of our thought about the world’ is fixed and universal. Berlin would not go as far as Strawson in postulating the permanence of our core concepts and categories: Berlin believes that there are certain naturalistic and humanistic categories of thought that are indispensable to human understanding even if their indispensability is an empirically contingent matter. Berlin is more interested in the question of how the more fundamentally humanistic patterns of thought underpin and inform our moral and political beliefs and the manner in which our normative understanding of ourselves and society varies and changes spatio-temporally. But Strawson himself is not resistant to recognising the impact of history on our self-understanding and therefore the need to constantly revisit the elements of descriptive metaphysics. As he states:

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radical reinterpretation of Kant’s paradigmatic transcendental argument is that all our patterns of thought, even our most fundamental and abstract, Metaphysics has a long and distinguished history, and it is consequently unlikely that ether are any new truths to be discovered in descriptive metaphysics. But this does not mean that the task of descriptive metaphysics has been, or can be, done once and for all. It is constantly to be done over again. If there are no new truths to be discovered, there are old truth to be rediscovered. For though the central subject-matter of descriptive metaphysics does not change, the critical and analytical idiom of philosophy changes constantly. Permanent relationships are described in an impermanent idiom. Which reflects both the age’s climate of thought and the individual philosopher’s style of thinking. No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms; and it is characteristic of the very greatest philosophers, like Kant and Aristotle, that they, more than any others, repay this effort of rethinking. P.  F. Strawson, Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics (1959: University Paperback, London), 10–11. It is also worth highlighting that Kant’s critical philosophy, especially his transcendental argument, had a significant, if implicit, influence on the work of the eminent Oxford philosopher of law, H. L. A. Hart. Hart, who was a contemporary of Berlin, began his academic career as a linguistic philosopher but ended up specialising in the area of jurisprudence. The impact of Kant’s ideas is notable in Hart’s paper ‘Are there any natural rights?’, Philosophical Review, vol. 64 (1955), 175–91 as well as in his seminal work, The Concept of Law (1961: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 189–195. The following passage from the latter work is a classic instance of a transcendental argument at work, which, in this case, provides Hart with the basis of ‘the minimum content of natural law’ that he argues is crucial for any feasible and defensible theory of law to get off the ground: The general form of the argument is simply that without such a content laws and morals could not forward the minimum purpose of survival which men have in associating with each other. In the absence of this content men, as they are, would have no reason for obeying voluntarily any rules; and without a minimum of co-operation given voluntarily by those who find that it is in their interest to submit to and maintain the rules, coercion of others who would not voluntarily conform would be impossible. The Concept of Law, 189. Hart identifies the following five core elements of a minimum content of natural law; human vulnerability, approximate equality, limited altruism, limited resources and limited understanding and strength of will. He then ends his discussion of this theme in the following Kantian manner: It is in his form that we should reply to the positivist thesis that ‘law may have any content’. For it is a truth of some importance that for the adequate description not only of law but of many other social institutions, a place must be reserved, besides definitions and ordinary statements of fact, for a third category of statements: those the truth of which is contingent on human beings and the world they live in retaining the salient characteristics which they have. The Concept of Law, 195.

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are contingent and sensitive to circumstance. (CC2 215–16) Berlin believes that Kant’s central, if unintentional, achievement leads to the acknowledgement that thought itself cannot escape history. However, he does emphasise that some categories and concepts are less contingently mutable and historically variable than others; for instance,  those which shape our knowledge of the world of inanimate objects are, typically, contingently more permanent and common than those which shape our understanding of ourselves. Berlin ends up dramatically revising and then extending Kant’s transcendental argument by claiming that in addition to the basic categories of thought such as space, motion and time which Kant claimed are necessary features of our experience of the natural world, there are also peculiarly humanistic categories and concepts which underlie and make possible human self-understanding. These latter, more anthropologically-­ centred patterns of thought are, more often than not, less fixed, shared and clearly defined than those which make possible our experience of the material world even if the difference is a matter of degree rather than kind: All our categories are, in theory, subject to change. The physical categories – e.g. the three dimensions and infinite extent of ordinary perceptual space, the irreversibility of temporal processes, the multiplicity and countability of material objects – are perhaps the most fixed. Yet even a shift in these most general characteristics is in principle conceivable. After these come orders and relations of sensible qualities  – colours, shapes, tastes, etc.; then the uniformities on which the sciences are based  – these can be quite easily

As far as I can determine, the use of transcendental arguments in analytic political philosophy and jurisprudence is a topic awaiting the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. It could be argued, of course, that what Hart judges as fundamental and inescapable categories and concepts of human thought and experience are ultimately accidental and ephemeral. I think we can grant this point but with the vital caveat that any serious counter-argument would need to produce what it considers are the basic or alternative set of categories of human thought. W. G. Runciman was prepared to claim that while it is possible to deny the validity of concepts and categories that underpin the value of social organisation, ‘it is surely reasonable, with Hart, to dismiss such notions without argument; we need no more take seriously the political philosophy of (to take Hart’s own example) a suicide club than we did the flat-­earther’s geography’. See W.G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory (1963: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 169.

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thought away in fairy tales or scientific romances. The categories of value are more fluid than these; and within them tastes fluctuate more than rules of etiquette, and these more than moral standards. Within each category some concepts seem more liable to change than others. When such differences of degree become so marked as to constitute what are called differences of kind, we tend to speak of the wider and more stable distinctions as ‘objective’, of the narrower and less stable as the opposite. Nevertheless, there is no sharp break, no frontier. The concepts form a continuous series from the ‘permanent’ standards to fleeting momentary reactions, from ‘objective’ truths and rules to ‘subjective’ attitudes, and they criss cross each other in many dimensions, sometimes at unexpected angles, to perceive, discriminate and describe which can be a mark of genius. (L 144, Note 1)

But even though our more humanistic-centred structures of thought may be less stable and shared than their naturalistic equivalents, Berlin judged there exists a nucleus of self-descriptive categories and concepts observable among all or, at least, the overwhelming majority of human beings throughout our history. The implication is that these distinctly anthropocentric frames of reference are as indispensable and objectively real, though in a fundamentally distinct and different way, as the more naturalistic categories and concepts of thought. So, for example, we can reasonably expect that all or most forms of human existence and their associated, contextually situated frames of thought presuppose in one form or another the most elementary concepts of society, free will, survival, right and wrong, good and bad, as well as less primitive, ethically thicker notions such as justice, cruelty, compassion, selfishness, and so on. All virtues and vices are, to a greater or lesser degree, susceptible to radical historical and cultural variation, while some may even be unique to a particular form of life. For example, sincerity and authenticity are virtues we very much associate with the rise of modernity but do not feature much, if at all, in moral discourse and conduct in the pre-modern world. Similarly, what Hume called the ‘monkish virtues’ such as celibacy, humility and selfdenial were more central in the Christian past than they are today.33 This brings us to Berlin’s other key move, which is the historicist one, that our more human-centred categories and concepts will inevitably vary over time, with the implication that our own current patterns of thought and their accompanying ideals and values are historically specific to us. This Vichian insight is critical for at least two reasons. The first one  David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section IX, Part 1, 219.

33

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was alluded to by Austin in the footnote I referred to above where he states: This is by way of a general warning to philosophy. It seems to be too readily assumed that if we can only discover the true meanings of each of a cluster of key terms, usually historic terms, that we use in some particular field (as, for example, ‘right’, ‘good’ and the rest in morals), then it must without question transpire that each will fit into place in some single, interlocking, consistent, conceptual scheme. Not only is there no reason to assume this, but all historical probability is against it, especially in the case of a language derived from such various civilisations as ours is. (APP3 203)

The other major insight of historicism is that modernity and, more specifically, liberal society represents one particular, contingent form of life that is radically different  to previous historical societies but no less philosophically defensible and ethically precious for that reason.34 Finally, a core element of Berlin’s humanistic and historicist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental argument is its affirmation that certain concepts and categories of human self-understanding are sufficiently fixed and shared to permit us to make sense of our distant predecessors as well as very different contemporary cultures. Moreover, he did not consider that insisting on such common concepts and categories that make up what he called ‘the human horizon’ either required a belief in some warmed-up version of Platonism or a denial of the self-evident, empirical discoveries of cultural and historical relativism. As he stated himself: What I mean by the ‘human horizon’ is a horizon which for the most part, at a great many times, in a great many places, has been what human beings have consciously or unconsciously lived under, against which values, conduct, life in all its aspects have appeared to them. But I cannot guarantee that this will go on for ever, or has never been absent or altered in the past. I can only say that not only am I for it, but the great bulk of mankind, whatever its differences and conflicts, do, in fact, accept this as a minimum required by human solidarity, in terms of which human beings tend to recognise each other as such. (CTH2 316)

34  My earlier book on Berlin, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020), is primarily concerned with showing how he seeks to combine the distinct and competing demands of truth, reason and historicity into a pluralist defence of liberalism.

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Thought and Reality Let’s now consider, briefly, how Berlin’s understanding of philosophy informs his treatment of a substantive question, namely, what is political freedom? His treatment of this question is presented in his classic essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, his inaugural lecture as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. What chiefly distinguishes Berlin’s lecture is not so much that it reflects a willingness to discuss a normatively large and contested topic or indeed a preparedness to engage normatively with such a theme at a time when value-neutral analytic political theory was virtually de rigueur. Rather the main point of its departure is that it addresses the topic of liberty substantively and historically, showing not only that there is a significant – not merely a logically valid – distinction to be made between negative and positive liberty, but, far more importantly, that the failure to recognise that the indispensability of this distinction can cause significantly more harm than mere conceptual confusion. The crucial point here is that Berlin switches the default understanding of politics by making philosophy more accountable to the reality of the lived, human world rather than the other way around. This radical move means that history and, what he called ‘a sense of reality’ take centre-stage which in turn explains why most of ‘Two Concepts’ goes well beyond the methods and preoccupations of conventional conceptual analysis. And what they reveal is that negative and positive liberty respond to real and enduring political needs and human ideals: negative freedom has been the beating heart of political liberalism, with its insistence that individuals be left alone to follow their own desires and destinies, so long as their actions do not unduly harm others; similarly, positive liberty has lain at the centre of emancipatory as well as totalitarian theories of politics from democratic and republican doctrines to those of nationalism and communism. None of this should imply that Berlin is unconcerned with language. Rather he thinks that we can glean only so much from the abstract, ahistorical consideration of the surface meaning and usage of words. His defence of the meaning of vital concepts is not based on some naïvely pre-­ Wittgensteinian linguistic essentialism but on what these concepts have come to mean and stand for over the course of history. His understanding of the composition and centrality of certain core concepts is encapsulated in his emphasis on Bishop Butler’s observation, ‘Every thing is what it is

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and not another thing.’35 Berlin took Butler’s deceptively simply adage to heart and it informs his rejection of the various efforts that have been made both in theory and in practice to either assimilate certain moral and political values in terms of others or imply that there is one supreme value to which all others are subordinate. These  efforts can take the form of arguing, for example, that liberty is ultimately reconcilable with equality or fraternity or, alternatively, that justice or equality is the sovereign political value. Berlin was adamant that playing fast and loose with such concepts leads to nothing but intellectual confusion and frequently much worse. Liberty or equality or justice are not conceptual playthings that can be stipulatively redefined and/or manipulated according to the subjective or ideological preferences of some thinker or political party or movement. Echoing Butler, he affirms that ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience’ (L 172). Berlin has little patience, therefore, with the genre of linguistic political theory which limits itself to historically uncontaminated inquiries into words. The only kind of enquiry into language that is going to be of intellectual and practical use is one which gets down and dirty in the messy, capricious world of actual human life. To neglect the field of political thought, because its unstable subject matter, with its blurred edges, is not to be caught by the fixed concepts, abstract models and fine instruments suitable to logic or to linguistic analysis – to demand unity of method in philosophy, and reject whatever the method cannot successfully manage  – is merely to allow oneself to remain at the mercy of primitive and uncriticised political beliefs.(L 167)

By reversing the dialectic between philosophy and reality or, alternatively, between words and things and, more profoundly, by giving Kant’s transcendental idealism a radically anthropological and historicist twist, he reframed the nature and relevance of practical philosophy, the significance of which can be seen most clearly in his treatment of political liberty. After making the humdrum point that negative and positive liberty can strike us as two sides of the same conceptual coin – Berlin acknowledges 35  J. Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls; and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue (1914 ed.: Bell, London), Preface, No.39. The question of whether Bishop Butler’s advice is based on some implicit form of linguistic essentialism remains a moot point. But one can, I think, accept that Butler and Berlin have a legitimate point about the need to avoid darkening counsel by permitting undue definitional equivocation, a point which does not necessarily presuppose some jejune form of linguistic essentialism.

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that both concepts appear at ‘no great logical distance from each other’ (L 178) – he then proceeds to examine each of these political notions in historically and contextually concrete terms which reveals that not only is there a very real and historically important difference between negative and positive liberty, and, secondly that the failure to recognize its significance brings with it far more risks than conceptual error. For the kernel of Berlin’s essay is concerned with explaining why negative liberty has become such a pervasive ideal and need in the context of contemporary Western society. The source of its moral and political value lies in providing us with space to exercise our freedom to choose how we wish to pursue our own lives in a manner that is consistent with others in the same society enjoying the same right. Negative freedom, the freedom from external interference or coercion, is a political pre-condition of individual freedom of choice. The political value that Berlin ascribes to the absence of constraint does not mean that personal autonomy enjoys a higher moral status than other ideals such as equality or justice or patriotism. As we have already noted Berlin’s radical moral pluralism commits him to the view that there is an irreducible diversity of genuine human values and that no one human end or conception of the good life can be judged as objectively supreme. Consequently, the world we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. (L 213–14)

Berlin’s emphasis on the strategic priority of negative liberty over positive liberty is based on a combination of historical, political and philosophical considerations. Historically, he observed that while positive liberty has inspired the legitimate goal of self-government as well as many other noble ends, it is also unmistakably the case that the positive drive for self-mastery has been closely connected with the menacing rise of totalitarian ideologies in the modern age; the past has demonstrated all too frequently how quick and easy the transition can be from a desire for self-actualisation to the sense of having discovered one’s real or rational self and then ending up in the embrace of autocracy. In the contemporary political context in which ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ was written, Berlin’s treatment of negative liberty was conceived (and largely received) as a defence of liberal freedom against the opposing forces of communism and, to a lesser extent, fascism. Philosophically, Berlin was drawn to negative liberty on the grounds that it represented the best available response to the sociological

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fact and meta-ethical truth of value pluralism. Unlike positive liberty, negative liberty does not presuppose or imply a normatively thick and demanding notion of human nature, the kind of notion that assumes or requires an overarching and substantive ethical vision. The idea that human nature can be invoked to justify a particular, substantive conception of the good life that everyone can and should follow is, in Berlin’s view, no longer either philosophically credible or politically acceptable in the context of late modernity. This doesn’t mean that Berlin’s pluralist defence of liberalism operates in a moral vacuum or denies the reality of a normatively-loaded concept of human nature. As we have seen, his own account of value pluralism presupposes the validity of a shared, evaluativelyladen human horizon without which he argued mutual intelligibility and  interpersonal communication and evaluative appraisal  would be impossible. But he believed that the idea and reality of human nature is too conceptually and ethically indeterminate to form the basis of a single, comprehensive conception of the human good. Moreover, his commitment to negative freedom stems from the conviction that a liberal state is best understood as one that tolerates as wide a range of ‘experiments in living’ within the unavoidably  amorphous and contested limits of a common human horizon. Berlin was acutely aware that the cause of liberal freedom, what A.  E. Housman described memorably  as ‘elbow room’, may not inspire people in the dramatic way that more exhilarating ideals might accomplish but he remained unfailingly adamant that none of this should diminish its crucial and inestimable value.36 If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as action conceived of it – as an end in itself, not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right. (L 214)  ‘There is a lack of detail about Liberty, and she has indeed no positive quality at all. Liberty consists in the absence of obstructions; it is merely a preliminary to activities whose character it does not determine; and to write poems about Liberty is very much as if one should write an Ode to Elbow-room or a panegyric on space of three dimensions.’ A.  E. Housman, ‘Swinburne’, Poems and Brickbats (1910). For a perceptive and wide-­ ranging treatment of this feature of liberalism, see Leon Wieseltier ‘Two Concepts of Secularism’ in Edna and Avishai Margalit eds. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (1991: Hogarth Press, London), 80–99. 36

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Berlin’s essay suggests that when it comes to moral and political enquiry, neatly defined, rule-bound concepts are distinctly thin on the ground. More revealingly, it demonstrates an ambition to widen the curtains and bring to light the largely hidden, normatively-charged patterns of thought which mould our more explicit and tangible concepts. It places the contingency of history and the importance of social and political context at the centre of practical philosophical enquiry. It also shows that our moral and political concepts are inextricably evaluative and historically malleable and, therefore, any serious philosophical treatment of human affairs must be historically conscious (and self-conscious) and normatively engaged. Berlin’s approach contrasts sharply with mainstream linguistic moral and political theory which has a virtually in-built resistance to making sense of our moral and political concepts and ideals. A typically linguistic analysis of a political concept such as, for instance, democracy tends to begin with a dictionary definition of the word. It then quickly and predictably confirms that the problem with a lexicographical definition of a polysemous and honorific word like democracy is that it tells us everything and nothing; ‘rule by the people’ or ‘a representative form of government’ are fine as far as they go, but they are cripplingly uninformative. For instance, they don’t even begin to address, let alone answer, the basic questions of the nature and scope of democratic rule or who the relevant people are, let alone why democracy has been positively valued by so many over the last two centuries. In short, lexicographical definitions of conceptually and normatively pregnant concepts like democracy end up being unhelpfully tautologous. A more fruitful avenue of enquiry pursued by the linguistic philosopher, and one advocated by Austin, is to explore the etymology of a troublesome concept. In the case of democracy, we discover that the notion derives from the ancient Greek term, demokratia, where demos stands for ‘the people’ and kratein means ‘to rule’. We also find out that the classical model of democracy was a direct and radically participatory form of popular rule, albeit one in which the citizens or demos made up a minority of the total population of the Athenian city-­ state, making it look more like a broadly based oligarchy. But such etymological inquiries tend not to help much either. In the case of democracy, all they reveal is the negative insight that modern democracy shares little more than a semantic similarity with its ancient precursor. At this point, we might be asked to resort to taking another leaf out of the book of linguistic techniques and seek to give a formal definition of democracy. A formal definition operates on the assumption that the question ‘What does

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democracy mean?’ can be kept separate from the factual question of ‘What does democracy look like in the real world?’ as well as the evaluative question ‘Why is it admired?’. But this approach is very likely to return us to something equivalent to a more elaborate variation of a dictionary definition of democracy with the ineluctable shortcomings that this approach faces. Confronted with such a challenge, the linguistic philosopher might resort to introducing a distinction, one that was a favourite of Austin’s Oxford colleague Gilbert Ryle, between a word’s use and its usage. This distinction is intended to bracket the essentially formal question of giving an account of the rules of the correct use of the word from the empirical question of how the word is or happens to have been used in specific settings during particular periods. In this context, the use of a word is also being contrasted with its misuse, that is, when the rules that define the meaning or use of the word are violated. For instance, we can give a formal account of the game of chess that defines the rules of the game independently of having to enquire into the actual conduct of chess players at various times and places. But the problem with applying this distinction with regard to an evaluatively- and ideologically- charged concept such as democracy is that to all practical intents and purposes it ends up being a distinction without a workable difference. It is not just that there is no universally agreed and determinate formal ‘use’ or indeed ‘misuse’ of the word democracy but that the so-called formal use of the term is inextricably bound up with its diverse and often rival usages  which are in turn underpinned by normative theories or doctrines. Unlike chess, democracy is an example of an ‘essentially contested concept’, that is, a concept that cannot be properly grasped without acknowledging that its meaning is fluid and  value-laden all the way down and that the  presuppositions and  values associated with its various  meanings and uses are both contested and essentially contestable.37 The moment we recognise that the 37  See W.B.  Gallie’s classic paper, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’ in his Philosophy and Historical Understanding (1964: Chatto & Windus, London), 157–91. Recognising that a word like democracy is an essentially contested concept should not imply that all normative or value-laden words are essentially contested or, at least, not to the same extent as concepts like democracy, justice, cruelty, love, etc. For example, it is possible to agree about the meaning and application of an ethically thin notion like ‘right’ in the context of a debate on whether it is right to re-introduce the death penalty. All sides in such a debate might reasonably agree about the meaning of ‘right’ here without, of course, reaching consensus about whether the death penalty should be reinstated. Other instances of such morally thin concepts include obligation, duty, and ought.

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idea and ideal of a word like democracy and similar-type words are the conceptual equivalent of an antique Russian doll, the need for something more philosophically ambitious and resourceful than putatively valuefree and static linguistic analysis becomes glaringly obvious.

Philosophy and Human Understanding Where, you may ask, does the foregoing discussion leave us? There are, I suggest, several salutary lessons to be derived from Austin’s and Berlin’s understanding of philosophy. Let me begin briefly with the more discernible ones from our discussion and then conclude with a less obvious one. The first thing to emphasise is that both Austin and Berlin reject the view that philosophy is or ought to be, as Bernard Williams pithily put it, ‘secretary to science and obituarist of metaphysics’ (CC2 xxxii). They both contribute to the liberation of philosophy from the stranglehold of scientific over-reach and the scientistic biases that have tended to accompany the idea that the only legitimate kind of philosophy is a positivist one. Austin sought to establish the autonomy of philosophy as a rationally respectable and specialist intellectual discipline by locating its chief business in the critical analysis of the meaning and use of our shared, everyday language. The goal of philosophy, therefore, is to critically and sedulously investigate everyday language, what his colleague Gilbert Ryle described as ‘linguistic cartography’, so that we might arrive ultimately at a more precise and reliable understanding of ourselves and the world. Berlin had different reasons for arguing in favour of a post-positivist conception of philosophy. He provides us with by far the more persuasive explanation of the persistence of philosophy and of its role in showing that our ability to treat philosophical questions is always and necessarily finite and fallible. He achieves this by prompting us to consider what makes It is also possible, of course, to introduce the distinction between a concept and a conception of a complex, contested word. For example, we could argue that there is a core, abstract concept of democracy which stands for ‘rule by the people’ and various and rival substantive conceptions of democracy such as direct and representational forms of democracy. Without wishing to entirely disregard the value of this conceptual distinction, it doesn’t get us very far in making sense of how words like democracy or freedom or equality operate in a specific, shared form of life. In sum, it is impossible to insulate such concepts from the causality and contingency of the social world and therefore the seemingly useful distinction between concepts and conceptions tends to flatter to deceive.

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philosophy different from both science and everyday common sense. His view of the philosophical project is based on the idea that philosophy is centrally concerned with a plurality of meaningful yet intractable problems that do not fall into the domains of the inductive (e.g. chemistry) or the deductive (e.g. logic) sciences. A large part of our recognition of the possibility and value of philosophy relies on acknowledging that we do not need to commit ourselves to a common sense or scientific view about all serious questions of human concern, that non-scientific forms of human understanding and knowledge are possible  and necessary. According to Berlin, a question is no less objectively valid for being enduringly unanswerable. In this respect his view of the subject echoes Kant’s memorable remark in the Critique of Pure Reason: Human reason has this peculiar fate, that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.38

Berlin’s metaphilosophical leanings reflect a profound trust in philosophy’s questions and a distrust of their alleged answers, a trust that is informed by a proclivity to do justice to the special character and difficulty of philosophy and a distrust born of a scepticism about philosophy’s capacity to solve the more profound questions of human life. He wants to change the way we look at philosophy by insisting that philosophical progress is less about securing consensus and far more about bearing witness to the complexity, contingency and variability of human thought and conduct. His writings suggest that we learn far more from working out why 38  Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1929: Macmillan, London), preface to first edition, 7. Berlin is more explicit about this aspect of Kant’s contribution to philosophy in his introduction to The Age of the Enlightenment (1956):

Kant …did shift the centre of philosophical emphasis from the two questions ‘What is deducible from what?’ and ‘What entities are there in the world, whether outside, or in the mind?’ to an examination of the most general concepts and categories in terms of which we think and reason – frames of reference or systems of relations like space, time, number, causality, material thinghood, of which we seem unable to divest ourselves save very partially, even in imagination, and which are not dealt with in the textbooks devoted to special sciences, because they are too universal and too pervasive and, prima facie at any rate, do not fit into any classification, either empirical or formal. (POI 60)

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the problems and perplexities of philosophy retain their power to haunt us. At times, it is as if he is advocating the philosophical equivalent of Keatsian ‘negative capability’. Yet, the drawback of Berlin’s avowal that genuinely philosophical questions are insoluble is that it can strike us as too defeatist or, at least, unduly passive. There is a legitimate concern that Berlin may be selling philosophy short, that he is undermining the valid and ambitious dream of philosophy, namely, to arrive at the right and true answers to life’s deepest questions. Moreover, the suggestion that philosophy’s most basic problems are unamenable to uniquely right and definitive solutions can fuel the far cruder complaint that the subject itself amounts to an elaborate waste of time. In contrast, Austin’s approach to conceptual problems can seem much closer to the grandeur of philosophy’s traditional, hedgehog-like aspiration, which encompasses the goal of gaining a greater understanding of the big questions together with the more stridently Herculean impulse to resolve them. As we noted, Austin felt that philosophy had a more constructive role to play than the purely therapeutic one of liberating us from certain intellectual confusions and perplexities. And given that philosophy wishes to be taken seriously as a cognitive discipline which is committed to and capable of the discovery of knowledge, Austin’s impulse can hardly be dismissed. Yet while his efforts were not entirely in vain, it is undeniable that the more constructive, programmatic vision of linguistic analysis failed to fulfil its promise. And it failed, above all, because of something that Berlin became increasingly conscious of in the immediate aftermath of World War II, namely, the presence of deeply rooted yet barely grasped patterns of thought that mould our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Ordinary language philosophy under-appreciated or simply failed to perceive how deeply and pervasively our language presupposes largely hidden categories and concepts of thought that underpin and inform our quotidian understanding and behaviour. As we have seen, the linguistic method proved more or less effective in so far as it concerned itself with the more explicit features of our linguistic practices and to the extent that such practices are susceptible to conceptual analysis and clarification. But the moment we dig a little deeper and focus on more epistemologically and normatively loaded concepts and ideals such as truth, freedom, rationality, cruelty, beauty, freedom, equality, democracy, and so forth, the need for something more philosophically wide-ranging and imaginatively daring than the relatively limited and exiguous style of linguistic analysis asserts itself. It is hardly surprising that

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critics of linguistic philosophy regarded it as a ‘debased form of sociology of language’.39 The inadequacy of the linguistic method was especially pronounced in the field of practical evaluative philosophy. Here its main shortcoming stemmed from an uncritical adherence to two basic assumptions that it inherited from logical positivism, namely, that there exists a strict dichotomy between facts and values and, secondly, that the analysis of value-laden concepts could be carried out in a normatively neutral manner. As we have seen, the allegiance of linguistic analysis to both of these positivist articles of faith guaranteed its failure to produce anything more than a severely limited contribution to our understanding of the practical world of human affairs. At best, linguistic moral and political theory may act as an important starting-point for grasping the various shades of surface meaning of a particular substantive concept, but the overwhelming lesson one is left drawing from surveying the record of linguistic analysis is of a school of thought that is peculiarly unsuited to grasping the nature and implications of human values and social reality. The belief that undergirded the efforts of linguistic philosophers to finally disabuse philosophy of its traditional preoccupations is analogous to the belief that the heat from the sun is capable of melting an iceberg; the fatal flaw that is common to both is the illusion that there is nothing of relevance beneath the more observable, surface phenomena. Linguistic philosophers convinced themselves that the observable tip of the iceberg is all that exists and produced a correlatively  narrow conception of philosophy to suit their myopic outlook. Their partly legitimate yet excessive distrust of speculative metaphysics blinded them to the largely hidden and opaque but no less meaningful and fundamental presuppositions of our mental frameworks. Furthermore, they were oblivious of the fact that our more basic thought patterns inevitably alter and evolve over time with no particular rhyme or reason; the distinctly ahistorical prejudices of analytic philosophy ensured that, with a few honourable exceptions, its practitioners were (and remain) unwilling and possibly unqualified to carry out the sort of normatively realistic and historically self-conscious and wide-ranging investigations required to produce a genuinely illuminating picture, let alone a resolution, of the more important and 39  P. M. S. Hacker’s ‘The linguistic turn in analytic philosophy’ in Michael Beaney ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (2014: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 945.

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enduring questions of philosophy. A cursory review of back issues of Analysis, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society or the Journal of Philosophy from the 1950s through to the mid-1970s offers a reminder of how mind-­ numbingly boring and footling academic philosophy can become if it allows its more literal-minded and blankly unimaginative practitioners free rein.40 After highlighting in ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’ that philosophical questions occupy the intermediate, no-man’s land of unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions between the provinces of the formal and empirical sciences, Berlin notes that ‘there is a natural tendency to reformulate these questions [philosophical ones] in such a way that all or at any rate parts of them can be answered either by empirical or formal methods’ (CC2 5). The history of human knowledge, he states, shows that many of the questions that once belonged to the subject matter of philosophy have ended up being outsourced to sciences, such as physics, chemistry, economics, linguistics and psychology. But he insisted that no matter how much philosophy exfoliates itself many, if not most, of its questions remain incapable of being successfully handled by common sense or the normally reliable methods of deduction or induction. But why? Why isn’t it possible to expect that all genuine questions will someday be conclusively answered by the sciences or some other viable form of human study? The answer, Berlin claims, is intimated by Kant. As we have seen, Berlin was profoundly influenced by the world-changing view of Kant which claimed that our experience and thought are shaped by the categories we unavoidably impose on them. According to Kant, there is no way of knowing the world 40  It wasn’t for nothing that Ernest Gellner felt the need to produce a stinging assault on linguistic philosophy and found a broad and receptive audience for his notorious book, Words and Things (1959: Gollancz, London). The penultimate paragraph of the book captures Gellner’s withering assessment of ordinary language philosophy:

It is of course a comparatively minor matter whether such fundamental thinking is called “philosophy”, or whether that term is pre-empted for lexicography, be it “pure” or directed at investigating (usually quite hypothetical) delusions springing from an alleged misunderstanding of some word. Logically and historically, it would however seem preferable to retain the use of the word “philosophy” for basic thought, for the discussion of fundamental and genuine conceptual alternatives and let those who wish to indulge in impressionistic lexicography find a new name of their own, if they can overcome their aversion for neologisms. 265.

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as it is in itself, or mind-independently, since our grasp of it is reliant on the contribution that we ourselves inescapably bring to the table in apprehending and conceptualising the world. Berlin was primarily interested in Kant’s Copernican revolution for the reason that it fundamentally rearranges our understanding of the world in such a way that we become more open to the unavoidably subjective element of all human thought as well as the epistemological possibility and legitimacy of non-scientific forms of human understanding. More specifically, he was less concerned with Kant’s insight regarding our grasp of the natural world and far more preoccupied with its implications for our understanding of the world of practical human affairs. What Kant unintentionally reveals is that there exists a variety of different and competing categories or models of thought, some more historically enduring and fundamental than others, that enable and shape our own self-understanding as well as our understanding of our fellow human beings. It is these ubiquitous and rival frameworks, which inform how we think, feel and act and which are never fully recognised and understood – most of them are too deep and obvious for us to even notice them – that provide the main subject matter of philosophy. To expect that the competing and contingent mental frameworks of the past that constitute our intellectual inheritance should lend themselves to a totalistic and harmonious philosophical system or indeed that they form part of some progressive historical libretto is both unrealistic and unjustified. And therefore, the recognition of the reality of these radically diverse and competing patterns of thought should make us deeply sceptical of those who claim to have discovered the presence of some monistic and all-encompassing coherence underlying humanistic thought: The perennial task of philosophers is to examine whatever seems insusceptible to the methods of the sciences or everyday observation, for example, categories, concepts models, ways of thinking or acting, and particularly ways in which they clash with one another, with a view to constructing other, less internally contradictory and (though this can never get fully attained) less pervertible metaphors, images, symbols and systems of categories. It is certainly a reasonable hypothesis that one of the principal causes of confusion, misery and fear is, whatever may be its psychological or social roots, blind adherence to outworn notions, pathological suspicion of any form of critical self-examination, frantic efforts to prevent any degree of rational analysis of what we live by and for.[…]. The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, not wildly, in the dark. (CC2 14)

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But what, it may be asked, is preventing us from gaining a full understanding of ourselves? Leaving aside the matter of the alleged impossibility and incoherence of monism, what, if anything, is stopping us from producing a complete picture of ourselves and the world? That is a large question which exceeds the scope of this discussion. What can be said by way of a brief reply is that if history has taught us anything it is that omniscience is beyond the reach of mere mortals. We are necessarily creatures of our own time with our own necessarily finite and limited perspective which is in turn the legacy of our equally limited and contingent historical inheritance. So the very idea that we could somehow transcend our humanity and occupy some purely non-accidental, Archimedean standpoint is both unachievable and incoherent. This doesn’t mean of course that human enquiry and the goals of truth, knowledge and virtue are meaningless. That is the verdict of a disappointed absolutist. One thing it can mean is that a featherless biped as limited, fallible and partial in its intelligence as a human being can coherently and justifiably have reason to believe in such things as truth, knowledge and virtue and continue to pursue them in good faith. Another thing that we can pursue in good faith from our situation is a realisation that we have far more to learn from our history in the sense of getting a better grasp of how we got here, what we can be justly proud of and what we lost sight of or suppressed along the way. This is a different way of looking at history than that adopted by the typical historian. Where conventional history seeks to explain how we got from A to B, a philosopher (or a more reflectively self-conscious historian) asks what we gained and what we lost in relation to truth, knowledge, virtue, even wisdom on moving from A to B.  Does this mean that all philosophy must be historical? No, but it is to claim emphatically that philosophy might be in far better shape if it became more historically self-­ aware. This is a topic we shall explore further on in Chaps. 5 and 6. We now come, finally, to what may be regarded as the most troubling feature of philosophy, that is, its seemingly abject failure to make progress. Austin was far more perplexed than Berlin about the unrelenting and conspicuous poverty of agreement among philosophers in relation to the defining problems of their subject. He felt there was something fundamentally and abashedly wrong about a discipline – at least in the Western tradition – that was locked in endless debate and bereft of proof of any genuine advancement since its inception in ancient Greece. The sense, on the one hand, that there is something discreditable about the ceaseless of philosophical dissent and, on the other, that the chronic inconclusiveness of

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such discussion is avoidable, spurred his philosophical investigations. He felt that if more time and care was taken in attending to the meaning and nuance of language that we would resist being entranced by many of the traditional questions of philosophy which presuppose all manner of muddled and imprecise thinking. Philosophy could then focus on its more constructive and substantive role of producing what Austin described as a ‘comprehensive science of language’, which he felt could only happen if philosophy became a genuinely co-operative and systematically  co-ordinated activity. He saw no reason why philosophy could not take a leaf out of the scientists’ handbook and, like them, produce conceptual results of genuine power. His series of weekly All Souls discussions after the war amounted to a kind of philosophical laboratory which may well have formed the background of the following comment in ‘A Plea for Excuses’: But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of  – the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.’ (APP3 175)

It is most likely that Berlin’s view of the  alleged intractability of philosophical questions struck Austin as drastically insouciant. Berlin believed that philosophy’s deepest questions are essentially contestable and inherently unanswerable, that philosophy is not a cumulatively progressive disciple in the way that the sciences pride themselves in being but is no less intellectually respectable and humanly valuable for that reason. As we have observed, he recognised that not all philosophical questions remain philosophical in perpetuity. The history of Western speculation is littered with examples of what were once unanswerable philosophical questions morphing into topics treatable by the empirical and exact sciences: the specialised fields of astronomy, physics, political economy and, more recently, of semantics and computer science which all began as areas of philosophical study which eventually got hived off into the natural and social sciences. As Berlin remarks: The history of thought is but a long series of parricides, in which new disciplines seek to achieve their freedom by killing off their parent subjects and eradicating from within themselves whatever traces still linger there of ‘philosophical’ problems, that is, the kind of questions that do not carry within their own structure indications of the techniques of their own solution. (CC2 6)

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But even though one could argue that philosophy makes progress by giving birth to new and independent fields of study, most notably in the sciences, Berlin did not believe that the subject would eventually become redundant and die once all its problems were outsourced and  resolved. For him the existence of philosophical questions can never expire as long as human thought flourishes. And the reason for this lies mainly in the fact that philosophy concerns itself with the largely hidden and troublesome ideas and assumptions that all forms of human thought and enquiry presuppose and take largely for granted. Besides, many of the most fundamental questions that were originally raised over two and a half millennia ago remain, mutans mutandis, as unmistakeably real yet stubbornly resistant to definitive answers as ever: we are still debating the questions of the reality or otherwise of truth, knowledge, morality, free will, and beauty even if the terms of those debates have changed over the course of time. This reconfirms the centrality of history to philosophy. History keeps philosophy honest by reminding it of the limits and failures of human thought. It also provides philosophy with a virtually bottomless source of self-understanding and humanistic knowledge. So who or what are we to believe? Is Austin more warranted in his view that since the difficulty of philosophical questions tends to derive from their lack of clarity and precision, their resolution is largely achievable through a careful and concerted exercise in linguistic phenomenology? As one of his former students, Geoffrey Warnock, recalls; Try much harder was Austin’s watchword.41 Or should we favour Berlin’s fundamental claim that inconclusive debate is not an aberration but a hallmark of philosophy? I think, on balance, Berlin is on surer ground not merely because his conception of philosophy makes more sense in light of the historical development and vicissitudes of the subject. It also seems more faithful to the intrinsic spirit and scope of philosophy itself, to what Herzen called ‘the courage of know’.42 Seeing philosophy in terms of the type of problems it is preoccupied with captures the authentic and necessarily changing identity of the discipline more readily and reliably than impatiently wondering why more of its questions have not been put to rest.  It is interesting to note that shortly before Austin died, he confided to his sister Ann Lendrum: ‘You know Ann, I think I should have devoted  Geoffrey Warnock, J. L. Austin (1991; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), chapter 1.  ‘Dedication’ to ‘From the Other Shore’, Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, (1956: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow), 336. 41 42

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such talents as I have to something more practical than philosophy.’43 It is hardly surprising that a man of such an exact, down-to-earth and concrete disposition would find the perpetual disagreements of philosophers disconcerting, perhaps even scandalous, and, therefore, betray an impatience with the subject by asking ‘Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?’, rather than the more open and speculative one of ‘What, if any, sort of progress might be possible in philosophy?’ All this confirms yet again the centrality of temperament to philosophy. Berlin points out that Austin ‘detested vagueness, obscurity, abstractions, evasion of issues, by escape into metaphor or rhetoric or jargon or metaphysical fantasy.’ (PI3 158). Each of these qualities can be described as a strength as well as a shortcoming from a philosophical perspective. The undeniable originality and brilliance of Austin’s writings demonstrate what can be achieved when an unpretentious, clever and ingenious mind applies itself to the problems of philosophy. Austin is a philosopher who is refreshingly free of theoretical presuppositions and invasive biases: he may have been a labelled, along with Ryle and Wittgenstein, a founder of linguistic philosophy, but he was far from a blind devotee of what became its more doctrinal presumptions. He was simply too good and honest a philosopher to put his faith in a method which he felt provided the best hope of philosophical progress. But it also remains the case that his writings bear the unmistakable stamp of the linguistic method: apart from exhibiting the tell-tale features of pedantry and scholasticism, his approach suffers more seriously from an excessive allergy to all forms of metaphysical abstraction and a refusal to regard philosophy as more than a highly specialised academic subject with its own priorities and preoccupations. Another less warranted complaint about Austin’s method of doing philosophy centres on its supposed shallowness. To his credit, Austin leaves us 43  Ann Lendrum, ‘Remembering J. L. Austin’ in Brian Garvey ed., J.L. Austin on Language (2014: Palgrave, Basingstoke), xxiv. It’s worth noting that in more recent years there has occurred a revival of interest among contemporary analytic philosophers in Austin’s work. One of the more interesting is Mark Kaplan’s Austin’s Way with Scepticism: an essay in philosophical method (2018: Oxford University Press, Oxford) which makes a compelling case that Austin’s conception of ordinary language philosophy provides a fruitful way of treating one of the deepest epistemological problems that continue to preoccupy philosophers, namely, the challenge of scepticism. Other recent notable works that seek to rehabilitate Austin’s philosophical approach include Avnar Baz’s When Words Are Called For (2012: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass) and Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, (2013: Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL).

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with the abiding thought that ‘shallowness’ may not be a bad thing. His own writings put forward a strong case that there is much more to be reckoned with on the semantic surface of human life than the Western philosophical tradition has assumed: if a concern with language is considered shallow then long may philosophy be a shallow discipline – after all, its long, uninterrupted record of being self-consciously preoccupied with the allegedly deep and meaningful questions of life has not exactly produced results that could be described as either tangible or cumulative. Austin remarked in his paper ‘Pretending’, ‘I am not sure importance is important: truth is’ (APP3 271). Warnock offers a plausible interpretation of this comment – he suggests that what Austin is saying is that we should not presume that the ‘important’ questions of philosophy are genuinely important but instead must retain an open mind and a healthy dose of scepticism about their putative importance. Interestingly,  Warnock suspects that Austin may have intended to convey another message, notably, that philosophers should not try to be ‘important’ or original as such efforts will likely inhibit them from being honest and  serious philosophers.44 Berlin shared Austin’s scorn for pretentious flights of metaphysical fancy and he was not unsympathetic to the idea that worthwhile conceptual insight is harvestable from the careful analysis of ordinary language. But he didn’t share Austin’s assumption that the Oxford style of linguistic analysis, no matter how ingenious and fine-grained, has the capacity to make a major contribution to the resolution of philosophy’s more persistent and profound questions. He felt that the linguistic school was philosophically superficial, in a bad way, both in its aspiration to pursue a form of value-neutral, conceptual enquiry and, more problematically, in its failure to register the barely understood yet deeply influential aspects of our thought which inform our everyday language and conduct. Berlin saw far more depth in the surface of human life than linguistic philosophers fathomed. Moreover, his preparedness to trust questions over answers, disagreement over consensus, the zigzag of history over the straight lines of ahistorical theory, prompted him to probe more deeply and imaginatively the nature and limits of our temporal human understanding. He dared to occupy that promiscuous and necessarily precarious intellectual space where we experience the sense that there are normative insights about human life we can honestly claim are true and right while acknowledging  Geoffrey Warnock, J. L. Austin (1991: Routledge, London), Introduction.

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that they do not possess any transcendent meaning or eternal vindication. In other words, his anthropologically deep and historically-inflected explorations are not founded on the belief that there exists some unifying and overarching conceptual pattern underlying our thought. For Berlin the resolute intransigence of philosophical questions bears ample and objective witness to the contingently inevitable variousness of human thought and experience and in a way that reflects the underlying historical, epistemological and metaphysical elements of our largely implicit, poorly understood and ever changing conceptual frameworks. His problem with linguistic philosophy is not its repudiation of transcendent styles of thinking (which he distrusted as strenuously as any empiricist) but its refusal to go below the semantic surface of our thought and explore the underlying and opaque mental patterns from which our everyday language and ideas are derived and shaped. While he believed that the reality of human life and human history should provide the raw material of human understanding, he also affirmed that such material ran deeper than anything linguistic philosophy was able  and willing to plumb. Berlin’s work reflects an intellectual fidelity to remain at the profound surface of human life but his account of the depth of that topography puts the unhelpful abstractness and barrenness of much  linguistic philosophy in sharp and unforgiving relief. Where Austin used a microscope, Berlin deployed a wide-angle lens camera with the result that two very different philosophical vistas emerge in their writings. Where Austin’s microscopic and minute investigations produce miniature, highly nuanced and rigorous conceptual insights into the everyday meaning and use of words, Berlin’s macro philosophico-­ historical explorations reveal the more synoptic and promiscuous insights that are derivable from non-scientific forms of enquiry, forms that include much of what we already intuit and value about human life. Berlin didn’t think that Austin’s conception of philosophy was wrong, just not sufficiently wide-ranging or deep. On the other hand, Austin would have no doubt regarded Berlin’s vision of philosophy as insufficiently philosophical in the sense that it lacked the methodological rigour and minute focus required of serious and cumulative linguistic field work. In the next chapter, we will be comparing Berlin’s philosophical approach with that of a thinker who was took a more holistic (or, more accurately, descriptively metaphysical) approach to conceptual analysis than Austin. And yet for all their differences Berlin and Austin shared a common belief about what might well be the subject’s most central and enduring

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trait, namely, its ultimate unquenchability. In this vein, one might recall Austin’s charming remark in the final paper he published in his lifetime: ‘I dreamt a line that would make a motto for a sober philosophy: Neither a be-all nor an end-all be. (APP3 271)

Moreover, it was Austin who conveyed the singular and inexhaustible essence of philosophy in the following striking terms: it’s a description that Berlin endorsed and exemplified in his own writings, more effectively than Austin managed in his comparatively short life45: In the history of human enquiry, philosophy has the place of the initial central sun, seminal and tumultuous; from time to time it throws off some portion of itself to take station as a science, a planet, cool and well regulated, progressing steadily towards a distant final state. […]. Is it not possible that the next century might see the birth, through the joint labours of philosophers, grammarians and numerous others students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language? Then we shall have rid ourselves of one more part of philosophy (there will still be plenty left) in the only way that we can get rid of philosophy, by kicking it upstairs. (APP3 232)

 Berlin states in his paper ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’:

45

[…]. To use a simile that I cannot claim to have invented, philosophy is like a radiant sun that, from time to time, throws off portions of itself; these masses when they cool down, acquire a firm and recognisable structure of their own and acquire independent careers as tidy and regular planets; but the central sun continues on its path, and does not seem to diminish in mass or radiance. (CC2 191) The extent of Berlin’s admiration for Austin as a philosopher and a person is expressed in a letter he wrote to his friend, Morton White, a month before Austin died of cancer  in February 1960: […] He is marvellously cheerful and stoical and is behaving much too well, stiff upper lip – too much so – I go to see him once a week – I am really terribly fond of him, and he certainly has taught me more philosophy than anyone has, and I think on the whole that he is the cleverest man I have ever known – in curious ways also the nicest, perhaps not the nicest, but wonderfully benevolent, kind, good, and just, in spite of all his little vanities, etc. (E 718)

CHAPTER 4

Berlin and P. F. Strawson on Freedom

Of course I believe in free will. What choice do I have? Anon

In 1961 Peter Frederick or P. F. Strawson, as he is more commonly known, delivered a lecture to the British Academy that one notable contemporary philosopher recently judged ‘perhaps the most influential philosophical paper of the twentieth century’.1 The paper in question is ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (henceforth FR). Three years after the publication of Strawson’s groundbreaking paper, Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’ (henceforth FHFSF) appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.2 While FHFSF neither created the same stir as FR nor proved nearly as influential, its philosophical substance and relevance rival it. The purpose of this chapter is to show that we can reach a deeper appreciation of the nature and significance of the problem of free will by reading these papers side by side, in their mutually illuminating light.

1  Philip Pettit in a review article entitled ‘Law of demand’ in The Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2007. 2  Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. XLVIII, 1962 and later published in P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and other essays (1974: Methuen, London), 1–25. Hereafter referred to as FR.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6_4

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In the preface to his book Skepticism and Naturalism (1985), Strawson makes the following general remark about philosophy: Agreement among experts in the special sciences and in exact scholarship may reasonably be hoped for and gradually attained. But philosophy, which takes human thought in general as its field, is not thus conveniently confined; and truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faceted, that any individual philosopher’s work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force. Hence the appearance of endemic disagreement in the subject is something to be expected rather than deplored; and it is no matter for wonder that the individual philosopher’s views are more likely than those of the scientist or exact scholar to reflect in part his individual taste and temperament.3

Strawson’s typically acute observation gets us  off to the right start. We have already seen from the two previous chapters that conflict rather than consensus is the engine of philosophy. Philosophical questions are defined not just by the absence of a uniquely correct solution but by the presence of irreconcilable yet plausible answers. The better answers are those that capture more of the truth or heart of the matter than reductionist ones. But solutions that tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth appear to be beyond our reach. Strawson suggests that complete and irrefutable solutions to philosophical questions are inherently elusive. Even the best available solutions to philosophical problems will only ever be able to ‘emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force.’ The burden of what follows is to show that although Strawson managed to grasp part of the truth regarding the problem of freedom or free will (I shall use these terms interchangeably) this was achieved at the cost of neglecting other important aspects of the same problem, aspects which Berlin treated ‘with greater force’.

3  P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985: Columbia University press, New York), vii. Hereafter referred to as SN.

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The Silence of Determinism One of the reasons why FR has survived the test of time is because it is unlike most of the work that has been written on the free will question over the last hundred years. Strawson’s essay manages to navigate an original and gripping path between the Scylla of libertarianism and the Charybdis of compatibilism. He felt that adopting a new approach was advisable since libertarianism is unbelievable and compatibilism is unsatisfactory. Libertarians hold that we are free in the strong sense, that our actions cannot be causally explained or not entirely anyway. Another way of articulating the essence of libertarianism is expressed in the idea that I really could have done other than I did. On the other hand, compatibilists want us to believe that the only freedom that is available or necessary is the non-libertarian freedom that is compatible with an inescapably determined world. The idea here is that determinism is not incompatible with freedom per se but only with naïve and incompatibilist versions of free will. The main problem with libertarianism is that it seems to purchase freedom at the cost of scientific truth by claiming that the laws of physics are in some crucial, freedom-enabling way incomplete or random. The major difficulty with compatibilism is that it claims the truth of determinism removes the possibility of (and need for) our ordinary ultimate sense of freedom, seeing us as nothing but bundles of particles determined by the basic and universal laws of nature. We are therefore confronted with two fundamentally different and conflicting views of freedom that operate more often than not like ships at night with the result that the free will debate deteriorates into a dialogue of the deaf, holding out no apparent hope of reconciliation and conclusion.4 The chief virtue of Strawson’s contribution to the free will question is its refusal to join either of the intransigent opposing camps. He points us towards a more subtle and sophisticated way of responding to the issue. More specifically, Strawson offers a way of dealing with the matter which opens up the vista of giving us a better ‘solution’ without demanding that the problem of free will, in so far as it is a problem, can be solved in any 4  Libertarianism and compatibilism are not the only candidates in relation to the problem of free will. Other contenders include hard determinism, fatalism, scepticism and indeterminism and several other more exotic isms. But the principal theories examined by Strawson and Berlin were libertarianism (sometimes referred to as incompatibilism) and compatibilism. For an authoritative account of the present philosophical state of the free will debate, see Robert Kane ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002: Oxford University Press, Oxford).

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kind of final, metaphysical sense. Implicit in FR is a recognition that the question of free will is in a way intractable. But it is also informed by the conviction that the philosophical anxieties about this particular issue are more widespread and intensely felt than they merit, especially about the supposed implications of determinism for how we should live our lives. The core of Strawson’s thesis can be summarised straightforwardly enough. He argues that libertarians who are a species of ‘pessimists’ as well as compatibilists who are species of ‘optimists’ suffer from a hyper-­ intellectualist reaction to determinism.5 The pessimistic libertarians exaggerate the threat of determinism to our everyday notion of freedom by insisting that unless we deny its truth we will end up literally losing our freedom. In a desperate effort to protect free will they tend to fall back on the scientifically incredible, extra-phenomenal claim that there exists such a thing as ‘contra causal freedom’. This ‘pitiful intellectualist trinket’ is intended to give us the critical leeway we need to stay true to our belief that we possess free will in the strong sense, i.e. that we can do other than we do. The crippling problem with this strategy, according to Strawson, is that it commits itself to an unappeasably ‘obscure and panicky metaphysics’ that does not stack up against our naturalistic picture of the world. Indeed, it is hardly much better than Dr Johnson’s notoriously dogmatic response to the problem of the freedom of the will: ‘Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end of’t’.6 On the other hand, the optimistic compatibilists overestimate their capacity to match up what they view as the implications of the undeniable truth of determinism with what we ordinarily consider it is to be genuinely free and morally responsible agents. They invariably do this by selling our ordinary notion of freedom short with the result that the alleged reconciliation of determinism and freedom never materialises: optimistic compatibilists fail to give pessimistic libertarians the only freedom they believe is worth having. In effect, they

5  It’s worth emphasising that it is possible to be a pessimist without being a libertarian: a pessimist in Strawson’s scheme is some who claims that determinism is incompatible with our notions of individual freedom and moral responsibility. So hard determinism falls within the general category of pessimism since it argues that determinism renders freedom and moral autonomy incoherent. Libertarianism agrees with the hard determinist that determinism is incompatible with freedom but contends that determinism is not true or, at least, not provably true, and therefore our ideas of personal freedom and moral responsibility remain coherent and defensible. 6  James Boswell, The Life of Dr Johnson (1791, first edition, London) vol. 1, 316.

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have failed to provide a convincing answer to Dr Johnson’s commonsensical, if pre-reflective, challenge. It is at this point that the originality of Strawson’s contribution to the seemingly interminable debate asserts itself. Rather than attempt to give a stipulative definition of determinism and freedom  – two concepts that Strawson thinks are more obscure than clear – and judge how we measure up to their requirements, he looks at the commonplace reality of human social interaction and considers how it measures up to what the optimists and pessimists demand.7 Implicit in this approach is the conviction that the best way of making sense of free will is to consider the concrete practices of ordinary human relations in which we hold each other responsible together with the attitudes we adopt towards each other in the context of these practices. He calls these commonplace attitudes ‘reactive attitudes’; they consist in the ‘natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us’ and encompass such attitudes as admiration, gratitude, forgiveness, resentment, indignation and guilt. These essentially evaluative reactions are revealed in people’s attitudes and conduct which in turn confirm their membership of and participation in a shared way of life. So far not so very startling. But what sets Strawson’s account apart is his central and original claim that freedom and responsibility are constituted by our adoption of these normative reactive attitudes toward one another. If Strawson is right then it would seem that our age-old, metaphysical anxieties about the implications of determinism are largely misguided. Let’s recall that the incompatibilists insist that if determinism were shown to be true then we would have no choice but to give up or, at a bare minimum, radically revise our evaluative reactive attitudes and associated practices since they presuppose and depend upon the very freedom and responsibility made impossible by determinism. Strawson believes this pessimistic perspective amounts to a theoretically drastic and unjustified overreaction to determinism. Its core problem is that it underestimates the extent to which determinism is already woven into our reactive attitudes and, secondly, that it exaggerates the nature and extent of determinism’s impact on these same commonplace attitudes and their corresponding 7  Strawson’s deep scepticism about the meaning and implications of determinism are articulated in a dialogue he participated in with Geoffrey Warnock and J. F. Thomson in a collection talks and papers edited by David Pears, Freedom and the Will (1963: MacMillan, London), 48–68.

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practices. He insists that determinism does not imply that freedom and responsibility are impossible and that our reactive attitudes already factor in circumstances in which we do not hold people responsible for their attitudes such as when they act out of ignorance or do something unintentionally or suffer from insanity or some other relevant incapacity. Accordingly, determinism represents more of a theoretically generated bogeyman than a genuine threat to our understanding of freedom and moral responsibility. If we are prepared to take the Strawsonian turn then the familiar, philosophically embattled landscape changes radically. Anxiety levels are prone to subside on both sides; the pessimists realise they can enjoy their strong version of freedom, happy in the knowledge that determinism no longer counts as a fatal menace, while the optimists have no reason to tie themselves in knots trying to come up with some new and revisionary theory of freedom that is compatible with determinism and per impossible acceptable to the pessimists. But Strawson does not leave things there. He adds a fascinating twist. It centres on his initially disarming recommendation of what we could and should do if it so happened that the truth of determinism could be demonstrably and conclusively proved and if its truth turned out to be unambiguously incompatible with our existing reactive practices. He begins by offering what might be described as an inescapability defence of existing reactive attitudes in response to a recognition of determinism. This defence rests its case on the claim that we couldn’t abandon our everyday reactive attitudes even if we tried since they are too deep-seated in our way of life. In other words, our current attitudes and practices regarding freedom and responsibility have become so psychologically unavoidable as to render forsaking them unfeasible. Strawson then adds a further and, in a way, more intriguing argument in justification of our reactive attitudes. We might describe this second argument as his ‘pragmatic defence’. Here he claims that even if per impossibile we could give up our commitment to our existing reactive attitudes in an attempt to accommodate the competing truth of determinism, it would not be rational to do so. The rationality of retaining our existing ideas and practices of freedom and responsibility rests, he argues, on the fact that the profound sense of loss we would incur as a result of suspending them would dwarf any argument that could be mounted for their abandonment. To think that the truth of determinism should transform our ordinary view of freedom is, according to Strawson, to suffer from the peculiarly philosophical delusion of believing that an external metaphysical perspective should override the way we make sense

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of and indeed live our lives. As part of this second, pragmatic defence, Strawson highlights the example of the problem of induction which has provoked nothing like the same level of angst when it comes to our everyday view about cause and effect: Compare the question of the justification of induction. The human commitment to inductive belief formation is original, natural and non-rational (not irrational), in no way something we choose or could give up.[…]. Ever since the facts were made clear by Hume, people have been resisting acceptance of them. (FR 23)8

Strawson uses the analogy of induction to urge that we resist the hyper-­ rationalistic impulse that ends up forcing our phenomenological web of beliefs into some metaphysically induced straightjacket: with induction, the question would be: ‘Isn’t it simply rational to accept a kind of Humean scepticism about induction?’ and the answer is that ‘We understand rationality itself in terms which already include a commitment to some form of induction.’ So, asking the question in this case is, in effect, missing the point. Strawson is saying that the same point is no less applicable or decisive with regard to the matter of determinism and freedom. Aside from hyper-rationalistically minded thinkers, the rest of us don’t go around arguing among ourselves about metaphysical determinism and its implications for how we live our lives or interact with one another:

8  A theme that Strawson doesn’t consider but that may be even more telling in this context is our attitude to music. We can derive enormous pleasure as well as meaning from the sound of music while at the same time accepting that, from a scientific perspective, music can be described as mere sound waves. Our awareness that music can be described in such bare scientific terms neither spoils our enjoyment of music nor the profound meaning it may give our lives. The next obvious question might then be: why should we treat our ordinary view of freedom any differently? Why must we demand that ultimate freedom is both true and crucially important to us? Why, in other words, can we not just be happy about its special significance for us and forget about the matter of its truth? The rhetorical character of this question would seem to favour Strawson’s position over Berlin’s. I am indebted to Richard Lindley for highlighting the possible comparability of our attitudes to music and to freedom during a conversation we had about FR in Berlin’s alma mater Corpus Christi College, Oxford in January, 2020. Interestingly Berlin expressed a similar view of how induction works or, more specifically, that we presuppose that it is unproblematically correct in his paper ‘Induction and Hypothesis’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume. 16 (1937), 63–102 and republished on IBVL.

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Optimist and pessimist misconstrue the facts in very different styles. But in a profound sense there is something common to their misunderstandings. Both seek, in different ways, to overintellectualize the facts. Inside the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings of which I have been speaking, there is endless room for modification, redirections, criticism and justification. But questions of justification are internal to the structure or relate to modifications internal to it. The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification. Pessimist and optimist alike show themselves, in different ways, unable to accept this. (FR 23)9

So determinism is more innocuous than both the pessimists and the optimists would have us believe or are willing to accept. It doesn’t require us to believe in some implausible contra-causal version of agency nor does it mandate a root and branch revision of our existing notions of freedom and responsibility. To claim that we should imperil our vital and valued internal beliefs about freedom and morality so that they more readily correspond to the truth of determinism is as practically unnecessary as it is psychologically unfeasible. If determinism is true – and Strawson is pretty confident it is – it doesn’t need any help from us mere mortals to help it on its way. Correspondingly, if our ordinary belief in freedom is not backed up by the truth of determinism, it does not follow that we should sacrifice our entrenched set of beliefs about freedom for the sake of seeking to align them with such a truth. In sum, we should not consider ourselves rationally beholden to some external, metaphysically-inspired obligation to cease believing in and acting on our everyday, muscular notion of freedom and moral responsibility since the quest to seeking to live the truth of determinism is psychologically and pragmatically non-optional.10

9  See Paul Russell’s essay ‘Hume’s Lengthy Digression: Free Will in the Treatise’ in Donald Ainslie and Annmarie Butler eds. The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise (2015: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 230–51, which claims that Strawson’s argument in FR is anticipated in interesting ways by Hume. 10  Justin Coates argues that Strawson’s justification of our everyday sense of freedom and moral responsibility is based on a transcendental-style argument. See Justin D.  Coates, ‘Strawson’s modest transcendental argument’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2017, Vol. 25, No. 4, 799–822.

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Truth and Freedom Berlin comes at the matter of truth’s relation to the problem of free will from a very different angle. Rather than seeing the truth of determinism as having a benign impact from a practical perspective on our ordinary, strong notion of freedom, Berlin interprets truth or knowledge as epistemic values that are capable of conflicting with our everyday, essentially libertarian notion of free will. What sets his paper, FHFSF, apart is the idea that we may need to give the value of free will greater allegiance than the value of truth or at least a certain kind of truth. In a way, Berlin’s view of the place of truth in the free will debate is more radical than Strawson’s. But before we are in a position to appreciate just how radical it is, it is necessary to provide a brief account of how Berlin arrives at this unorthodox conclusion. He begins his essay by challenging the biblical bromide that ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’ (John 8.32) insofar as it is considered applicable to the problem of free will. How can we say that truth or knowledge makes us freer, he asks, if determinism is true? How could the knowledge that there are causally sufficient conditions for what we do be judged an increase in our freedom? Berlin is intimately aware of the compatibilist response to this question but he finds it evasive and unconvincing. To claim, as the compatibilist does, that I am freer because I know the truth of determinism and therefore know that I can do what I choose, but I cannot choose otherwise than I do, falls critically short of our ordinary, do or die understanding of freedom. For Berlin, ‘the half-loaf’ offered by compatibilism or self-determinism ‘is not the bread the libertarians crave’. As he states: I am only half free if I can correctly maintain that I should not have done x if I had not chosen it, but add that I could not have chosen differently. Given that I have decided on x, my action has a motive but not merely a cause: my ‘volition’ is itself among the causes – indeed one of the necessary conditions – of my behaviour, and it is this that is meant by calling me or it free. But if the choice or decision is itself determined, and cannot, causally, be other than what it is, then the chain of causality remains unbroken, and, the critics asserted, I should be no more truly free than I am on the most rigidly determinist assumptions. (CC2 237)

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Berlin is careful not to deny that determinism may well be true.11 He is fully aware of and open to the possibility, even probability, that it is true. But his central claim is that believing in the truth of determinism does not enhance our freedom and to suggest that it does is not just to commit a category error but to misunderstand entirely the meaning and importance of our day-to-day idea of freedom. The category error consists in thinking that a gain in knowledge is necessarily compatible with or entails a gain in freedom. Berlin sees this as a violation of common sense and, more profoundly, of his deeper pluralistic world view. The discovery of the supposed truth of determinism does not make someone more free in the normal and ultimate sense of being free. If determinism is true its recognition will undoubtedly increase our freedom from ignorance and illusion but this should not be confused or conflated with our sense of genuine freedom of choice. As he argues: Knowledge will render us freer only if in fact there is freedom of choice – if on the basis of our knowledge we can behave differently from the way in which we would have behaved without it – can, not must do – if, that is to say, we can and do behave differently on the basis of our new knowledge but need not. Where there is no antecedent freedom – and no possibility of it – it cannot be increased. Our new knowledge will increase our rationality, our grasp of truth will deepen our understanding, add to our power, inner harmony, wisdom, effectiveness, but not necessarily, to our liberty. If we are free to choose, then an increase in our knowledge may tell us what are the limits of this freedom and what expands or contracts it. But only to know that there are facts and laws that I cannot alter does not itself render me able to alter anything: if I have no freedom to begin with, knowledge will not increase it. […] This goes for self-determinism no less than for its most full-­ blown mechanistic-behaviourist variety. (CC2 240–1)

Secondly, the notion that an increase in knowledge entails an increase in freedom contravenes a deeper insight that stems from the putative truth of pluralism, a theory that, as we have seen in the previous chapters, is one of the cornerstones of Berlin’s thought. The relevance of pluralism in this context is that it can make sense of an irreducible conflict between the dictates of truth and the commitments of freedom in ways that other, more mainstream philosophical theories can’t. In contrast to 11  It is never far from the reader’s mind in this debate that if determinism is true then of course it is already and always true no matter what we say or do.

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monistic-type philosophical perspectives, it is not committed to the view that all genuine values, including epistemic ones, are compatible and form part of a hierarchically ordered and unified whole. And in contrast to more naturalistic and subjectivist moral theories it does not claim that values are fundamentally expressions of personal taste. Pluralism argues that values are objective but that their objectivity is not entail that they form part of some necessarily single, harmonious system. Moreover, pluralism holds that ineradicable conflict between values is not only compatible with but constitutive an essential ingredient of our objective moral experience. We should not be surprised therefore that knowledge and freedom do not always overlap and can occasionally conflict with each other. Berlin makes this point in the closing lines of FHFSF: to say that knowledge is a good is one thing: to say that it is necessarily, in all situations, compatible with, still more that it is on terms of mutual entailment with (or even, as some seem to suppose, is literally identical with), freedom, in most of the sense is in which the word is used, something very different. Perhaps the second assertion is rooted in the optimistic view  – which seems to be at the heart of much metaphysical rationalism – that all good things must be compatible, and that freedom, order, knowledge, happiness, a closed future (and an open one?) must be at least compatible, and perhaps even entail one another in a systematic fashion. But this proposition is not self-evidently true., if only on empirical grounds. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers. (CC2 258–9)

What should be emerging by now is that Berlin holds a different understanding of truth’s place in the free will debate compared with that of Strawson. Where Strawson is happy to disarm the perceived threat of truth to our everyday, strong sense of freedom by claiming that it is harmless from a practical perspective, Berlin argues that we may face a genuine and ineliminable choice between accepting and living the truth of determinism and staying true to our ordinary but incompatibilist notion of freedom. For Strawson, the conflict between truth and freedom is more apparent than real, whereas for Berlin the possible truth of determinism presents a real and potentially fatal challenge to our commitment to freedom. Which view should we accept? Before we try to answer this question, it is worth emphasising the degree to which Strawson and Berlin are in agreement on the matter of free will. They both share the view that freedom should be defined as it is

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conceived and lived in the internal, non-naturalist sense of the term. Neither believe that compatibilist freedom offers us the type of freedom that is compatible with the reality of freedom and moral responsibility as we experience it. Both judge that any serious attempt to reconcile our everyday, participative notion of freedom with determinism would involve the destruction of our current moral ideals and practices. Indeed, they share the view that while it is not theoretically inconceivable that we could at least try to live the truth of determinism, such an effort would lead to the demise of our current understanding and practice of freedom and morality (FR 11, 13 and CC2 240, 247). Strawson, of course, does not think that we need to involve what he sees as the blankly incoherent notion of ‘contra-causal’ freedom in a pragmatic defence of our ordinary conception of freedom. However, he is adamant that the effort to live determinism practically is not a real option and, moreover, not an option that we should feel under a rational, let alone, obligation to follow in our everyday lives. Working out why Strawson and Berlin do not believe that living the truth of determinism is a genuine option for humanity helps us to uncover the more profound insights of their respective contributions to the problem of freedom. It will also help us to determine which of their views may be closer to the truth or, at least, more plausible.

Reason and Freedom According to Berlin, there are two major reasons why it’s rational not to give up our day-to-day belief in ultimate freedom even if determinism is or may be true. The first centres on the negative reason that even if we were prepared to forsake our traditional sense of freedom and moral responsibility for the sake of intellectually and dispositionally aligning ourselves with the putative brute fact of determinism, it is far from clear what exactly we would be signing ourselves up to. One of Berlin’s main complaints against those who claim that we can and should live in accordance with the truth of determinism is that they don’t come anywhere near explaining how this might work in practice or if it would even be intelligible to our understanding of  agency. Moreover, he claims that  they are guilty of underestimating the scale of the transformation for humanity that would result from a universal acceptance of determinism (whether it’s actually true or not). What differentiates determinism from other major intellectual revolutions in the past, he contends, is that it goes well beyond requiring a radical shift in our understanding of the world. According to Berlin,

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if humanity were seriously to accept and thereby act on the alleged truth of determinism, our basic conceptual framework would undergo a colossal and intolerable shift: Such a break with the past, in psychology alone, would do great violence to our present concepts and usages. The entire vocabulary of human relations would suffer radical change. Such expressions as ‘I should not have done x’, ‘How could you have chosen x?’ and so on, indeed the entire language of the criticism of one’s own and others’ conduct, would undergo a sharp transformation, and the expressions we needed both for descriptive and for practical – corrective, deterrent, hortatory – purposes (what others would be open to as a consistent determinist?) would necessarily be vastly different from the language which we now use. (CC2 246–7)

Berlin’s more positive argument in favour of retaining our loyalty to libertarian-­style freedom centres on his conviction that it forms the bedrock of our humanity. Without freedom – the idea ‘that there are degrees of freedom, degrees constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice; the choice being regarded as not itself determined by antecedent conditions, at least not being wholly determined’ (CC2 248) – life as we know it would lose its very  shape and meaning. For Berlin ultimate freedom is not just a pre-condition of how we make sense of our own lives and relate to others, it is also presupposed by our various moral outlooks as well as our deepest and most crucial political and legal principles. The universal abandonment of libertarian freedom, assuming such a thing were even psychologically possible, would result in such a monumental transformation in our conceptual  understanding of what it is to be a human being as to render it beyond our comprehension. As Berlin remarks: The ‘dissolution’ of the concept of freedom would be accompanied by the demise of that sense of ‘know’ in which we speak not of knowing that, but of knowing what to do, […]; for if all is determined, there is nothing to choose between, and so nothing to decide. Perhaps those who have said of freedom that it is the recognition of necessity were contemplating this very situation. If so, their notion of freedom is radically different from those who define it in terms of conscious choice and decision.’ (CC2 258)

Berlin concludes that since determinists (or compatibilists) have not merely not proved beyond doubt that determinism is true but, more culpably, have not come anywhere close to describing what living

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determinism in a self-conscious way would amount to, we would be profoundly unwise to voluntarily relinquish our sense of freedom. Strawson puts forward a similar, if more supple, position with regard to the rationality of rejecting the need to deny everyday freedom in favour of deliberatively living, or at least trying to live, our lives in line with the truth of determinism. He begins by highlighting that we already adjust and inhibit our normal moral reactive attitudes – of praise and blame, goodwill and resentment and so forth – towards individuals in certain circumstances (where someone did something by accident or through no fault of their own, and so on) and towards individuals who are morally undeveloped such as children or the mentally unbalanced (where it would be inappropriate to apply our normal attitudes of moral approbation and disapprobation, etc.). But he believes such objectively-motivated adjustments to or suspensions of our normal reactive attitudes have evolved and by now happen naturally and are not derived from a deliberate effort to follow ‘the theoretical conviction of the truth of determinism’ (FR 13). Strawson is adamant that we should not replace our everyday and ultimate notion of freedom for the sake of a self-consciously determinist version of freedom. His reason for rejecting such an option, which he firmly believes may not even be a particularly real one in the practical sense of the term, mirror Berlin’s. As Strawson says: A sustained objectivity of inter-personal attitude, and the human isolation which that would entail, does not seem to be something of which human beings would be capable, even if some general truth were a theoretical ground for it. (FR 11–12)

In the paragraph before the above passage, he concedes  – again like Berlin – that anything close to a blanket and sustained acceptance of determinism is not ‘absolutely inconceivable’ but it is psychologically unliveable and practically inconceivable for the following reason: The human commitment to participation in ordinary inter-personal relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as inter-personal relationship as we normally understand them; and being involved in inter-­ personal relationships as we normally understand them precisely is being exposed to the range of reactive attitudes and feelings that is in question. (FR 11)

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The affinity between Berlin’s and Strawson’s views regarding the grounds for maintaining our commitment to our everyday sense of freedom, in the context of a world that may well be determined, becomes even more notable when Strawson expands on the claimed rationality of this commitment. In his effort to justify our resistance to suspending our everyday attitudes and practices that depend on our strong sense of freedom and moral responsibility ‘given the general theoretical conviction of the truth of determinism’, he makes the telling remark that the very question of what it would be rational to do if determinism is true betrays a complete failure to grasp the real heart of the matter. For the question misguidedly assumes that such an option is even possible. Like Berlin, Strawson is extremely doubtful that such an option is realistic – as distinct from purely notional – since it presupposes that human beings could rationally commit themselves to something that ‘is not in our nature (to be able) to do’ (FR 18). And his reasons for scepticism resemble those of Berlin: the fact of our natural human commitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes.[…] is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases come up for review within this general framework. […] If we could imagine what we cannot have, viz. a choice in this matter, then we could choose rationally only in the light of an assessment of the gains and losses to human life, its enrichment or impoverishment; and the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality of this choice. (FR 13)

The similarity between Strawson’s and Berlin’s scepticism regarding the possibility of internalising and living the practical implications of determinism is striking. They are agreed that our everyday, ultimate sense of freedom is so embedded in our conceptual understanding of humanity as to render a consideration of living a life in accordance with the truth of determinism beyond our conceivable reach. This is what makes the practical problem of free will unique for both thinkers. It is also why they both think that it is not only not irrational to continue to live our lives in accordance with our implicitly incompatibilist version of freedom but rational to resist the rationalistic pressure to live the truth of determinism.

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Living with/Under/Without Illusion The foregoing discussion suggests there is something wrong or, at least, troubling about Berlin’s and Strawson’s treatment of the free will problem. They both leave us with a niggling suspicion that truth’s standing has been crucially weakened or compromised. Strawson does this by taking the sting out of determinism and demanding that we adopt a determinedly insouciant view of its supposedly detrimental implications. Berlin, on the other hand, argues that faced with a struggle between the putative truth of determinism and our everyday (implicitly) incompatibilist sense of freedom, we should not feel under any obligation to forsake the latter for the former. But each of these recommendations leave us in a quandary. They seem to commit us to an uncomfortable conflict between truth and freedom and an ultimately arbitrary, even irrational, prioritisation of the latter over the former. Surely philosophy’s purpose, it might be argued, is to show us how genuine values connect and cohere with one another rather than encourage their polarity and fragmentation? Endorsing Berlin’s and Strawson’s advice is likely to strike many as a bridge too far, as an unacceptable sacrifice of truth at the altar of pragmatic and psychological necessity. Generally speaking, truth is a value about which we find it peculiarly difficult to be diffident. We feel that a commitment to truth is and must be all or nothing, that the moment we compromise or soften its demands is the moment we extinguish its integral and fragile flame. The principle of the inviolability of truth is especially sacred to philosophers. If philosophers relent in their commitment to truth, the argument goes, they may as well pack up their bags for good. The central and overriding task of philosophy is to try to explain how things objectively are and not pander to how we might like the world to be. This sentiment is captured by Hannah Arendt in her essay ‘Truth and Politics’ where she replaces the word veritas for iustitia in the following adage, fiat veritas, et pereat mundus (‘let the truth be known and let the world perish’).12 The idea here is twofold: that the interests of truth are independent of the requirements of societal existence and, secondly, that the essence and value of truth would lose their meaning if they became wholly answerable to the demands of our social existence or survival. 12  Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’ in the New Yorker, February 25, 1967 and republished in her Between Past and Future (1977, 2002 ed.: Penguin, London), 223–59.

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A version of the perceived polarity between truth and freedom finds dramatic and memorable expression in the notorious Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the case of the novel the conflict is between authority and freedom but the analogy still works if we are prepared to see the conflict between the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus as one resembling that between the needs of humane solidarity and the demands of (allegedly) unendurable truth. As the Grand Inquisitor says to Jesus after presiding over yet another ‘resplendent’ auto-da-fé: Instead of taking mastery of people’s freedom, you have increased that freedom even further! Or did you forget that peace of mind and even death are more precious to man than free choice and the cognition of good and evil? There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting for him, either.

The Grand Inquisitor claims that he is more merciful than Jesus since he gives mankind what it wants, an absolute and realistic object of worship, rather than tormenting us with the more noble but unliveable gift of free will. The choice comes down to either happiness or dignity, servitude or freedom. Given that there is no happy or tenable middle ground, the Grand Inquisitor is left with no choice but to put Jesus, the harbinger of freedom, to death. What is of particular interest about this celebrated chapter to our discussion is that it amplifies the nature of the dilemma with which we seem to be confronted. Berlin can be interpreted as claiming that the possible truth of determinism is unliveable while the denial of our ordinary, ultimate sense of freedom is non-optional. Strawson can be read as arguing that the probable truth of determinism is not something that we should feel obliged to try to live, especially in light of the fact that such an effort would destroy everything we hold indispensable and precious in our day-­ to-­day lives. Yet surely there is a very significant, even intolerable cost here. Haven’t they given us what we want but at a huge price, the cost of the truth? Are they not recommending that we are better off living under the illusion or ignorance of freedom rather than seeking to live our lives in accordance with the truth? This question may seem more serious for Berlin than it is for Strawson. For Strawson is more prepared to grant the truth of determinism as well as deny the metaphysical basis of libertarianism. He simply thinks that within the practical world of our own everyday lives we should not feel under any rational obligation to jeopardise everything on

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the basis of some literal and mistaken fidelity to the dictates of rationality. The main weakness of Strawson’s position therefore seems to lie in postulating an unstable, even schizophrenic, attitude toward truth that may be as misplaced as what he regards as our attempts to transform (and effectively annihilate) our ordinary sense of ultimate freedom for the sake of aligning ourselves with the alleged requirements of determinism. The problem with this attitude is captured in the quip, ‘We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.’ In contrast, Berlin seems prepared to cut us loose from the truth by claiming that we should resist the putative truth of determinism on the basis that its universal acceptance would imperil, if not destroy, everything we hold most precious about our own lives and those of our fellow human beings. He is also prepared to commit himself to a libertarian notion of freedom that is at odds with our naturalistic understanding of ourselves and the world as determined. Berlin and Strawson are of course aware of these various objections but neither of them thinks that they are sufficient to undermine their respective views on the matter. Nor does either of them claim that their treatment of determinism commits them to illusionism, that is, the position that the only way to sustain our belief in everyday ultimate freedom is by accepting that it is empirically false but psychologically necessary.13 Berlin is most revealing about this in his introduction to Four Essays on Liberty where he sought to answer his colleague and friend Stuart Hampshire’s concern that: In the study of human behaviour, philosophical superstition might now easily take over the role of traditional religious superstitions as an obstruction to progress. In this context superstition is a confusion of the belief that human beings ought not to be treated as if they were natural objects with the belief that they are not in reality natural objects: one may so easily move from the moral position that persons ought not to be manipulated and controlled, like any other natural objects, to the different, and quasi-­ philosophical, proposition that they cannot be manipulated and controlled like any other natural objects. In the present culture of opinion a very natural

13  Illusionism is not without its defenders; see Saul Smilansky, ‘Free Will, Fundamental Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusion’ in Robert Kane ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 489–505. Smilansky argues in favour of illusionism on the negative basis that libertarianism is untrue and compatibilism and hard determinism are insufficient from a human perspective and on the positive basis that it allows us to have what he refers to as ‘workable beliefs’, which includes beliefs – like our libertarian belief in free will – that exist for the believer that are not negated in virtue of being false.

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fear of planning and social technology is apt to be dignified as a philosophy of indeterminism. (L 16–17)14

Berlin sees Hampshire’s position as based on a mistaken, if common, fear that science, rationality and indeed philosophy are necessarily imperilled if determinism is rejected. His main problem with Hampshire’s position, his reason for thinking it is ‘groundless’, is that it falls prey to the myth that because it may be rational to look for causes or to seek quantifiable explanations for things it must therefore be right to assume that all events have causes or that everything is quantifiable. Berlin consistently opposed this scientistic inference. His main reason for rejecting it is based on his view that science does not exhaust the realm of human understanding and rationality; there are events or phenomena that cannot be explained in quantitative or deterministic ways. His more positive argument centres on something we have already touched upon in previous chapters which is the belief that there exists a domain of human understanding that enables us to make sense of ourselves and others in ways that scientific methods do not possess. It is our humanistic but, he would argue, no less objective perspective that informs our understanding and appraisal of human beings as more than natural objects, as beings that possess an identity that sets them apart from other natural objects like chairs and mountains and insects. Once we are prepared to accept that science does not monopolise rationality and human understanding, we become less anxious about exploring aspects of humanity that are not necessarily susceptible to and may even be in tension with purely naturalistic explanations. Obviously, this does not mean that we should or need to become anti-scientific in our outlooks. As Berlin himself emphasises: What scientific method can achieve, it must, of course be used to achieve. Anything that statistical methods or computers or any other instrument or method fruitful in the natural sciences can do to classify, analyse, predict or ‘retrodict’ human behaviour should, of course, be welcomed; to refrain from using these methods for some doctrinaire reason would be mere obscurantism. However, it is a far cry from this to the dogmatic assurance that the more the subject-matter of an enquiry can be assimilated to that of a natural science the nearer the truth we shall come. (L 19)

14  The passage is taken from Stuart Hampshire, ‘Philosophy and Madness’ Listener 78 (July–December 1967) 289–92, at 291.

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A respect for science is entirely compatible with a rejection of scientism as well as a recognition that there exist other kinds of truth that are distinct from scientific forms of knowledge. And while there may not be direct conflict between our scientific and humanistic conceptions of the world, we should not expect that these separate perspectives will always or even mostly cohere with each other. We have no metaphysical or logical grounds for thinking that our scientific and non-scientific understanding of ourselves and the world should form some seamless web of belief. Indeed, we have every reason to think the opposite, that we have access to a plurality of perspectives, including scientific, imaginative, historical, ethical ones, that may at times overlap, at others behave more like ships at night and occasionally rub up against each other. The tension between determinism and libertarianism is a particularly dramatic and enduring case of when our external and naturalistic outlook rubs up against our more internallyfocused and humanistic view of the world. So to insist that libertarianism amounts to an illusory belief is a symptom of a delusion that naturalism provides the only available objective source of knowledge on the matter. It is also to fall prey to a version of the myth that we can somehow get outside the conceptual skin of our irremovable patterns of thought which enable and shape both our humanistic and naturalistic perspectives. Berlin articulates this fundamentally Kantian point in the following footnote from his essay ‘Historical Inevitability’: What can and cannot be done by particular agents in specific circumstances is an empirical question, properly settled, like all such questions, by an appeal to experience. If all acts were causally determined by antecedent conditions which were themselves similarly determined, and so on ad infinitum, such investigations would rest on an illusion. As rational beings we should, in that case, make an effort to disillusion ourselves – to cast off the spell of appearances; but we should surely fail. The delusion, if it is one, belongs to the order of what Kant called ‘empirically real’ and ‘transcendentally ideal’. To try to place ourselves outside the categories which govern our empirical (‘real) experience is what he regarded as an unintelligible plan of action. This thesis is surely valid, and can be stated without the paraphernalia of the Kantian system,’ (L 123)

Strawson’s paper evades the charge that his account of free will commits him to a denial or deflation of truth’s importance in our practical lives by deepening (and complicating) our understanding of the relationship between rationality and belief. As we have noted already, he suggests that

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anyone who thinks that the truth of determinism by itself requires us to abandon our ordinary inter-personal attitudes and conduct has a distorted and distorting view of the connection between rationality and the ‘objective view’ of which determinism presents itself as a feature. But in addition to sharing Berlin’s objection to the practical adoption of the truth of determinism on the basis that it would entirely subvert our ‘general framework of human life’, he makes another more subtle and interesting point. More sophisticated compatibilists or optimists may well ask from a more general perspective: ‘might it not be said that we should be nearer to being purely rational creatures in proportion as our relation to others was in fact dominated by the objective attitude? (FR 13)

To which Strawson replies: I think this might be said; only it would have to be added, once more, that if such a choice were possible, it would not necessarily be rational to choose to be more purely rational than we are. (FR 13)

This response reflects Strawson’s general position that there is no necessary or clinching reason to suppose that our internal and participative attitudes to ourselves and others neither should be disturbed by our naturalistic understanding of the world. We make sense of and justify our beliefs and practices about inter-personal relations, morality and freedom within our internal web of beliefs and any decision to change one or more of these beliefs will take place from within that internal perspective and not from without.15 As he states near the end of his paper: 15  One could argue, quite plausibly, and in no way belittlingly, that Thomas Nagel’s philosophical career has been, in large part, a brilliant and deeply engaging footnote to Strawson’s reply. I am thinking in particular to Thomas Nagel’s masterpiece The View from Nowhere (1986) which seeks to combine (to a greater or lesser extent) the distinct and frequently rival commitments of our personal and objective perspectives across a range of central philosophical topics including mind, knowledge, realism, morality, and freedom. Crucially, Nagel sees the tension between these two perspectives as a fundamental and unavoidable feature of human thought; the two perspectives are experienced at the same time and make conflicting demands upon us. The book’s chapter on free will is particularly successful in vindicating one of Nagel’s general claims, that reconciliation is not always possible between our subjective and impartial points of view. Interestingly, Nagel’s main criticism of Strawson’s handling of the free will problem centres on what he sees as Strawson’s exclusive and excessively one-sided

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Inside the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings of which I have been speaking, there is endless room for modification, redirection, criticism and justification. But questions of justification are internal to the structure or relate to modifications internal to it. The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification. (FR 23)

internal justification of everyday freedom and his refusal to acknowledge that ‘there is no way of preventing the slide from internal or external criticism once we are capable of an external view’ (125). It seems to me that Nagel has a valid point here; it is difficult to see how Strawson can successfully reconcile his claim that the truth of determinism is practically irrelevant with a recognition that we allow the objective viewpoint inform our considerations in other areas of practical life, including areas directly related to free will and moral responsibility. Also noteworthy in this context is Strawson’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions (1979) in the New York Review of Books, March 5, 1981, where he makes the following pertinent comments in relation to Nagel’s handling of the problem of free will (which prefigures Nagel’s treatment in The View from Nowhere): On the one hand, we tend to see and treat human beings and their actions, including ourselves and our own actions, as proper objects of the familiar range or moral attitudes and reactions – approval and admiration, guilt and remorse, blame and indignation. And such reactions, where felt as appropriate, seem to require an attribution of some ultimate responsibility for his actions, to the agent of them: they must be essentially his doings, under his control. But by a quite natural extension of the considerations which are normally allowed to cancel imputations of responsibility, the whole notion of responsible agency is seen to come into question. No one has been able to state intelligibly what the condition for it would actually consist in. So, in the limit, when we see ourselves and others and their and our actions objectively, as what they are, namely as natural objects and happenings, occurrences in the course of nature – whether causally determined occurrences or chance occurrences – then the veil of illusion cast over them by moral attitudes and reactions must, or should, slip away. What simply happens in nature may be a matter for rejoicing or regret, but not for moral approval or blame or moral self-approval or remorse. Yet, in the face of this reasoning, we remain as inescapably committed to such subjective reactions as to those subjective purposes which we continue to pursue in the face of our sense of their ultimate arbitrariness. What Strawson seems to be asserting and what Nagel seems to denying is that while we may find it psychologically and even conceptually impossible to occupy the internal and external perspectives at the same time, we can occupy them separately without having to live an impossible double-life. One recalls F Scott Fitzgerald’s line in The Crack-Up: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’

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Strawson ends his paper by concluding that ‘if we sufficiently, that is radically, modify the view of the optimist, his view is the right one.’ (FR 25). But the radicalness of the modification that Strawson considers the optimistic standpoint is required to make is unlikely to prove congenial to most compatibilists. And the reason for this is because Strawson makes the optimistic or compatibilist perspective more answerable to our profoundly entrenched social practices and moral attitudes than the other way around. In other words, he recognises that these practices and attitudes have a societal integrity and priority of their own which cannot and should not be overridden or drastically compromised by the unwarranted and invasive optimism of the naturalistic perspective. As he states: ‘What is wrong is to forget that these practices, and their reception, the reactions to them, really are expressions of our moral attitudes and not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes. Our practices do not merely exploit our natures, they express them. (FR 25)

God, Freedom and Belief I would now like to change  focus  somewhat and  explore a comparison between the belief in free will and the belief in God that may throw light on both. The Table 4.1 below gives a summary of how we might begin to answer such a comparative question: If we accept that the above questions are germane to helping us determine the nature of the belief in ultimate freedom, and if the proposed answers are plausible, then we have something we can start to work with. One of the first things that this table helps reveal is the enormous Table 4.1  Belief in God vs. Belief in ultimate freedom Belief in ultimate freedom (BUF) vs. Belief in God (BG) 1. Are they supported by naturalism? 2. Do they respond to human needs? 3. Are they aligned with our everyday sense of freedom and morality? 4. Are they rational? 5. If there is no God, are they baseless? 6. Are they illusions? 7. If they are illusions, are they necessary illusions?

Yes

No

Possibly

Both Both BUF

BG Both

BG

BUF Both Both

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influence that a naturalistic perspective has on our philosophical and day-­ to-­day thinking. Perhaps we have reached a point where we find it virtually impossible not to frame things through a naturalistic lens. But there is a lingering suspicion that the success of science has also blinkered our understanding of aspects of life that are not susceptible to a naturalistic perspective. This may be true of our belief in freedom. The virtue of Berlin’s and Strawson’s treatments of the topic is that they leave room for us to consider the matter in ways that connect with how we mainly experience and reflect on freedom. In short, their handling of the free will question feels both true and truthful. They look at the problem from the inside out rather than the outside-in with the result that we look at the age-old problem afresh. One of the ways their approach helps us do this is by prompting us to ask new and potentially more enlightening questions about free will such as whether a belief in free will has more or less in common with a belief in God (another questions that can become more interesting, if irreverently so, when examined from the inside-out). The table above suggests areas of overlap and difference between these two beliefs. My suggestion is that pursuing questions 2 and 6 may well prove productive. One of the things that might emerge from a more humanistic understanding of the supposedly illusory belief in freedom is that it may appear illusory from one particular but still dominant philosophical perspective. The supposed illusion of ultimate freedom may contain more truth than not if we have no rational choice but to accept it in our day-to-day thoughts and conduct. This brings us back to Strawson’s general remark about philosophy with which we began this chapter. His core point was that truth in philosophy, is so diverse and deep that all individual philosophical theories will inevitably emphasise certain aspects of the truth at the expense of others. Naturalistically-minded conceptions of philosophy, which still dominate academic philosophy, insist on seeing our pre-theoretical conception of freedom as scientifically naïve and baseless, while more humanistically-­ centred philosophical outlooks are committed to a far less dismissive view of our strong notion of free will and moral responsibility. Are we to conclude that each of these philosophical perspectives captures different aspects of ‘the complex and many-sided’ truth? And if so, are we left with the insight that the truth is contradictory? Perhaps. Indeed, it appears that the idea that the truth operates in accordance with Walt Whitman’s description of himself:

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Do I contradict myself? Very well then … I contradict myself; I am large … I contain multitudes.16

But leaving things hanging with a quote from a poem, even a great poem, is far from satisfactory. Philosophy may have lessons to learn from poetry but it has its own identity and raison d’être too. Neither Strawson nor Berlin resolve the free will problem nor do they reconcile the current and seemingly intractable clash between compatibilism and incompatibilism. We are left with the perplexing paradox that, on the one hand, we cannot accept that we ourselves and others are mere marionettes in a determined world, and, on the other hand, that we may well be indulging in an illusion to think that we can somehow defy the laws of such a world. There is a temptation to assign the unresolved tension to psychology, which will no doubt view the problem differently, perhaps seeing it as a special case of our inability to hold two different but not necessarily incompatible modes of thought in our mind at the same time. Such a diagnosis can make philosophical anxieties look somewhat silly and in desperate need of catching up with common sense. But such psychological analyses and resolutions rarely succeed in stilling a philosophical mind which, right or wrongly, is prone to go on thinking that there is or must be a deeper problem at work here. Compatiblists are more likely than libertarians to view psychology as their friend rather than their foe, since they tend to see our resistance to compatibilist freedom in psychological terms, whereas libertarians view efforts to psychologise what they identify as a contradiction between determinism and genuine freedom as an evasion. Berlin and Strawson give us distinct but partly overlapping reasons to be sceptical of compatibilism and the one-sidedness of the naturalistic conception of philosophy from which it derives. Their respective treatments of the problem of freedom are also informed by a judicious philosophical humility, a sense that we may be in the presence of a problem that is beyond our capacity to comprehend, let alone resolve. They achieve this by deepening our understanding of the human situation and its place in the debate: they both show signs of a deep sympathy with a remark of the very Kantian poet, Wallace Stevens:

 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass (1855: Brooklyn, New York). 55.

16

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[R]eality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are. The general sense of the word proliferates its special senses.17

The result is that we come to recognise that the ‘solution’ to ‘the problem’ of free will is unlikely to solve the problems of free will. Indeed, the illusion that a purely naturalistic perspective could solve the alleged problem of free will is apt to create a bigger problem or set of problems. While neither of them gives us an entirely satisfactory account of the issue they do provide us with a more searching grasp of the landscape as well as a less blank map from which to navigate our way around the relevant terrain. In this respect they both have much in common with the spirit of William James’ view of the matter. Let’s recall the final paragraph in James’ essay ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’: Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the possibilities are really here. Whether it be we who solve them, or he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate’s scales seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft alike, suppress by their denial that anything is decided here and now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error of continuing to believe in liberty. It is fortunate for the winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism this argumentum ad hominem can be its adversary’s last word.18

17  Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951: Alfred A. Knopf, New York), 25–6. 18  The Heart of William James ed., Robert Richardson (2012: Harvard University Press, Mass), 45. It is worth noting that on April 301,870 James wrote in his diary:

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essai and see no reason why his definition of free will – “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts” – need be the defini-

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It might be worth briefly reflecting on one of ‘those soul-trying moments when fate’s scales seem to quiver’. I am referring to the time of the summer months of 1940 when Europe was on the brink of total capitulation to the Axis Powers. As the Wehrmacht increasingly overwhelmed the French army, and the British Expeditionary Force along with French and Belgian troops (numbering over 350,000 soldiers) became stranded  at Dunkirk, Hitler’s total victory in Europe looked as certain as night follows day. And yet somehow this seemingly ineluctable event was averted. The sheer force of Churchill’s strength of will  – effectively ‘mobilising the English language and sending it into battle’, as Lord Halifax remarked – and its effect on the English public helped ensure ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’ and the prevention of the defeat of all of Europe by Nazism. Churchill’s words became potent deeds in a very real and obvious way at a time when Great Britain confronted the zero-sum outcome of victory or defeat, barbarism or civilisation. Does an event like this help prove or disprove the truth of determinism? Does it commit us to the belief that the ‘superhuman’ Churchill could defeat causality? No, but as Berlin said of Chaim Weizmann: [O]ne of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen. (PI 60)

It could be contended, plausibly enough, that this is a misposed question, since the truth of determinism neither presupposes nor relies on what happened at crucial moments in the mere minds of humankind. Causality happens whether our own parochial interests like it or not. The natural world of which we are necessarily a part follows its own pattern in complete and cold indifference to how we mortals  – including the ‘big men’ of history – may choose to attribute meaning to the past, present or future. In short, why should nature care what we do or think? And yet we can’t help thinking – Tolstoy memorably described it as a ‘psychological law’ in the appendix to War and Peace – that unless Britain was fortunate enough to have had someone as exceptional in the telling way that Churchill was in his role as Prime Minister in 1940, together with those tion of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present – until next year – that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. James delivered ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’ to the Harvard Divinity School in March 1884.

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brave souls who decided to set off in their ‘little ships’ between 26 May and 4 June, the course of human history would have been unimaginably different for Europe and much of the rest of the world. And if that’s true then we are left asking what the alleged truth of determinism adds up to for us. The compatibilist claim that we can live a meaningful life in conscious harmony with the truth of determinism lacks practical credibility and sacrifices our everyday sense of human agency while the libertarian conviction that ultimate freedom real and crucial is hardly corroborated by the scientific facts as we know them. The philosophical paradox of freedom persists. In the meantime, as Berlin consistently and eloquently reminds us, our belief in ordinary, ultimate freedom also remains, and forms the cornerstone of our self-understanding and our relations with others. Without the belief that we face an open future and that we are, in some residually meaningful way, morally responsible for our actions it becomes hard if not impossible to imagine what human life would be like. In this vein Berlin’s take on Churchill’s importance in 1940 is revealing: The Prime Minister was able to impose his imagination and his will upon his countrymen, and enjoy a Periclean reign, precisely because he appeared to them larger and nobler than life and lifted them to an abnormal height in a moment of crisis. It was a climate in which men do not usually like – nor ought they to like – living; it demands a violent tension which, if it lasts, destroys all sense of normal perspective, overdramatises personal relationships, and falsifies normal values to an intolerable extent. But, in the event, it did turn a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatising their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour. This is the kind of means by which dictators and demagogues transform peaceful populations into marching armies; it was Churchill’s unique and unforgettable achievement that he created this necessary illusion within the framework of a free system without destroying or even twisting it; that he called forth spirits which did not stay to oppress and enslave the population after the hour of need had passed; and he saved the future by interpreting the present in terms of a vision of the past which did not distort or inhibit the historical development of the British people by attempting to make them realise some impossible and unattainable splendour in the name of an imaginary tradition or of an infallible, supernatural leader. Churchill was saved from this frightening nemesis of romanticism by sufficiency of that libertarian feeling which, if it sometimes fell short of understanding the

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tragic aspects of modern despotisms, remained sharply perceptive – sometimes too tolerantly, but still perceptive – of what is false, grotesque, contemptible in the great frauds upon the people practiced by totalitarian regimes. (PI3 21–22).19

Back to the Future In 1983 Strawson delivered the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University, more than twenty years after he wrote ‘Freedom and Resentment’. There are two aspects of these lectures, published as Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, that are especially noteworthy in the context of the foregoing discussion. The first and most general one 19  The sentiment conveyed in the above passage offers an interesting contrast with Roy Jenkins’ memory of the same period;

The national mood – insofar as it had cohesion, even at a time when it is thought to have been uniquely united – was not so much defiant as impregnable. The prospects were awful, but people pushed the consequences of defeat out of their collective mind. It was not a question of bravery. It was more that they chose to believe that worst would not happen. To what extent this was a product of the mesmerizing quality of Churchill’s oratory is a difficult question to answer. His purpose and his method were to promote a mood of defiance. What he did, almost more in my recollection of my nineteen-year-old state of mind, was to produce a euphoria of irrational belief in ultimate victory. This at least stilled any paralysis of apprehensions, and made it possible to pursue normal activity, some parts of which were more useful to the war effort than were others, and to live surprisingly happily on the edge of a precipice. Roy Jenkins Churchill: A Biography (2001: Macmillan, London), 590. Churchill’s own more celebrated recollections of the momentous time offer another interesting perspective: […] as I went to bed at about 3 a.m. [on the morning of May 11, the day after he became P.M.], I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1 (1948: Cassell, London), 527. There is also the verdict of Sir Edward Bridges, then Cabinet Secretary, who wrote of Churchill between 1940 and 1942: ‘Everything depended on him and him alone. Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.’ Sir John Wheeler-Bennett ed., Action this Day (1968: Macmillan, London), 236. For an excellent historical treatment of the ‘fateful choices’ confronted by the British war cabinet in May 1940, see Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940–41 (2007: Penguin, London), chapter 1.

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is Strawson’s more developed and crystallised take on the naturalistic view of the world. Having surveyed and critically analysed four fundamental philosophical questions about the existence of external objects, the basis of morality, the nature and status of mental events, and the existence of abstract entities, Strawson concludes his book by arguing that we are left with at least two very different and opposing ways of making sense of each of them. The ‘strict naturalist’ or nominalist perspective, a viewpoint that is exclusively materialistic in its outlook, ends up solving these philosophical problems at the price of being intolerably reductive. On the other hand, the realist or ‘catholic naturalist’ perspective, a viewpoint that is both less exclusively materialist and more relativistically Kantian in its outlook, handles the questions in a way that leaves itself vulnerable to generating self-indulgent illusions. While Strawson sees no way to escape this philosophical predicament he ends his book by declaring that his sympathies lie with the untidy catholicism of realism rather than with what he observes as the increasingly widespread ‘reductive rage’ of nominalism. At a superficial level, his preference appears to be based on a quasi-instinctive antipathy toward the narrowness (and growing fanaticism) of nominalism and a deep-seated disposition toward the yielding inclusiveness of realism. However, his discussion of the reality of free will and morality earlier on in the book indicates there is something deeper and more philosophically interesting at work. After reiterating his position on free will, he argues that the main error that is made in relation to the detached and engaged standpoints of nominalism and realism respectively is not that either of them is wrong but rather the suggestion that we must choose between them. Strawson then defends this claim against the obvious charge that one cannot be committed to the truth of two contradictory standpoints by arguing that such a charge can only stick if ‘we assume the existence of some metaphysically absolute standpoint from which we can judge between the two standpoints’. He goes on to argue that once we give up the illusion of such an Archimedean perspective, the appeal of adopting a ‘reasonable relativity’ to such irreconcilable standpoints asserts itself. He concludes by declaring his loyalty to the conviction that we have a right to occupy both viewpoints without privileging one viewpoint over the other or dogmatically denying one at the cost of the other. His response to the charge that such philosophical ecumenism is evasive merits quotation: What the relativizing move does is to remove the appearance of incompatibility between members of the two pairs of views. Without the relativizing

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move, the scientific hard-liner, or reductive naturalist, could stick to his line; admitting that we are naturally committed to the human perceptual and morally reactive viewpoints, he could simply conclude that we live most of our lives in a state of unavoidable illusion. The relativizing move averts this (to most) unpalatable conclusion. It would surely be an extreme of self-­ mortifying intellectual Puritanism which would see in this very fact a reason for rejecting that move. (SN 50)

This forceful passage serves to highlight the deeper similarity that exists between Strawson’s and Berlin’s view of philosophy which we shall explore in a moment. What Strawson refers to as a ‘reasonable relativity’ between different and conflicting conceptions of the world, Berlin would define as an irreconcilable yet objective plurality of world views. Recognising this more profound resemblance does not obviate the difference between their respective views about how best to make sense of the notion of free will, not least their divergent views of the merits and demerits of incompatibilist freedom.20 But it does suggest that ‘the solution’ to the problem of free will may well lie in acknowledging rather than denying the existence of objectively valid but opposing ways of comprehending the world and in recognising that the difference between each of these perspectives with regard to ‘the problem of free will’ may well be incommensurable as well as incompatible.21

20  Strawson is neither satisfied with the strict naturalist conception of philosophy that one might associate with the American philosopher, W. V. Quine, nor is he prepared to endorse ‘an edifying or inspirational conception of philosophy’ that one suspects he would have identified elements of in Berlin’s humanistic account of philosophy. His own preference is for a conception of philosophy that is concerned primarily with conceptual understanding, including the interrelations and interdependencies between our most pervasive concepts. See his ‘Two Conceptions of Philosophy’ republished in P.  F Strawson, Philosophical Writings, edited by Galen Strawson (2011: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 166–77. 21  There is, of course, the distinct possibility that the ‘solution’, if any, to the problem of free will resides somewhere beyond Strawson’s and Berlin’s analyses. In this regard, one is reminded of Frank Ramsey’s remark following his review of an indecisive disagreement between Bertrand Russell and W. E. Johnson:

Evidently, however, none of these arguments is really decisive, and the position is extremely unsatisfactory to anyone with real curiosity about such a fundamental question. In such cases it is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both disputants.

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Berlin’s great hero, Alexander Herzen, is as discriminating on the topic of free will as he is on virtually everything he chose to write about. The following passage is taken from a letter to his son, Alexander, who had given a lecture arguing that the problem of freedom is essentially a physiological problem. Herzen Snr felt that his son’s paper gave a scientifically intelligent but one-sided view of human nature and needed to be counterbalanced by a more sociological perspective that ‘will snatch man from the anatomical amphitheatre and return him to history’.22 After teasing out various antinomies between free will and determinism, he states: The social ego, on the contrary, presupposes consciousness, and the conscious ego cannot act or be stimulated unless it assumes itself to be free, i.e. to have the faculty of being able, within certain limits, to do or not to do one thing or the other. Unless he believes this the individual dissolves and disappears…Throughout the ages man has sought to find his autonomy, his freedom, and, influenced by necessity, does not want to do anything other than what he desires; he does not want to be either a passive grave-digger of the past, nor an unconscious midwife of the future; history for him is his free and essential work. He believes in freedom no less than he believes in the existence of the external world as it appears to him because he believes his eyes and because without this faith he could not take a single step. Moral freedom is, thus, a psychological reality or, if you like, an anthropological reality. (SPW 574–75)

Herzen ends his letter to his son by asking ‘What is objective truth, then, you will ask?’. His answer suggests that he may have had more in common with Strawson than Berlin on the problem of freedom and determinism: ‘If I did not fear the old philosophical language I would repeat that history is the development of freedom in necessity. What man requires is to realize that he is free. Where is the way out of the circle? The whole point is not to find the way out of it but to understand it.’ (SPW 575)23 Frank Plumptom Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (1931: Kegan Paul, London), 115–16. 22  Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works (1956: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow), 571. Henceforth referred to as SPW. 23  Alexander Jnr ended up submitting the letter to Revue philosophique – which published it in 1876 – and wrote in the covering note that his father’s remarks did not convince him to change his mind on the matter.

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Herzen gave a sense of what that understanding discloses in his essay on the Welsh philanthropist and social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858): Both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore they are ready to go anywhere to which they are directed, if this is possible, that is, if nothing obstructs them. They are composed au fur et à mesure of an immense multitude of particles acting upon and meeting each other, checking and attracting each other; but man is by no means lost because of this, like a grain of sand in a mountain; is not more subject to the elements nor more tightly bound down by necessity: he grows up, by reason of having understood his plight, into a helmsman who proudly ploughs the waves with his boat, making the bottomless abyss serve him as a path of communication. Having neither programme, set theme nor unavoidable dénouement, the dishevelled improvisation of history is ready to walk with anyone; anyone can insert into it his line of verse and, if it is sonorous, it will remain his line until the poem is torn up, so long as the past ferments in its blood and memory. A multitude of possibilities, episodes, discoveries, in history and in nature, lies slumbering at every step.24

Exact and Inexact Knowledge In a paper entitled ‘Liberty and Necessity’, published in 1983, Strawson returned to the problem of free will.25 In addition to reiterating the core elements of his position in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, he elaborates his argument in several interesting ways, one of which centres on a distinction he draws between what he calls ‘exact’ and ‘inexact’ kinds of knowledge. This distinction and, more especially, his recognition of the latter type of knowledge, is relevant to our discussion. Strawson introduces the distinction between exact and inexact knowledge in the context of addressing the thorny issue of whether there is an 24  ‘Robert Owen’, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoir of Alexander Herzen, vol. iii, Constance Garnett trans. (1968: Chatto & Windus, London), 1244–45. On this aspect of Herzen’s outlook and much else see the fine essays on Herzen in Aileen M. Kelly Towards Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance (1998: Yale University Press, New Haven) and her Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov and Bakhtin, (1999: Yale University Press, New Haven). 25  P.  F. Strawson, ‘Liberty and Necessity’ in N.  Rotenstreich and N.  Schneider eds., Spinoza, His Thought & Work (1983: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem) 120–9 and republished in P. F. Strawson, Philosophical Papers, Galen Strawson ed., (2011: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 146–56. Henceforth referred to as LN.

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irreconcilable tension between ‘the reign of causality and the holding of moral attitudes’, that is, between a recognition of the truth of determinism and a commitment to the condition of being free. As we have seen, Strawson is opposed to the view that there is such a tension as well as the claim that there must be something wrong with our moral attitudes and the sense of freedom on which they rest given causality’s reign. After describing our sense of freedom and our proneness to regarding  moral attitudes and feelings as ‘natural facts’, he claims that there exists ‘a kind of non-specialist knowledge which we have of the sources of human dispositions, desires and actions.’ (LN 152). He then elaborates what this non-specialist and inexact knowledge consists in: We explain ourselves and others to ourselves and others in terms which we might call human and social terms. We refer to inherited traits, to social influences, to the effect of education, training, and experience, to the particular circumstances in which people find themselves. We speak of character and personality and the influences which form and modify them. (LN 152)

He contrasts this perspective with that derived from ‘the physical and biological sciences’ which views human beings as: genetically programmed mechanisms of immense complexity, mechanisms constantly modified by their own history and responding, in constantly modified ways, to sensory inputs with behavioural outputs. (LN 152)

He then asks us to imagine that if we could produce a complete causal explanation of human behaviour from the perspective of the exact sciences, would it be right to let it replace our inexact, non-specialist understanding and knowledge of the nature and causation of human behaviour? Strawson judges that one has only to raise the question to see that it is both unanswerable and absurd. It is unanswerable because the assumption underlying the question cannot be achieved and it is absurd because even if it were in principle possible to provide an account of human behaviour from an exclusively physicalist perspective, there would be no appetite to spend the inordinate amount of time required to provide such an exact, physicalist account of even modestly complex behaviour. This isn’t to suggest that the exact sciences are irrelevant to the question of free will but simply that the idea that they could provide an adequate explanation of human behaviour is ‘quite empty in a practical point of view.’ (LN 154)

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Strawson concludes that we must accept, therefore, the indispensability of our ‘relatively vague and inexact kind of knowledge.’ (LN 152). There are a number of things that are noteworthy about Strawson’s view of this facet of the free will problem. Apart from showing that his fundamental position on the topic appears to have remained unchanged, it reveals more about his own pluralistic outlook. The key point in this respect is his acknowledgement of the existence of a perspective which is distinct from the more exact sciences and yet qualifies as knowledge, albeit of a more nebulous and non-specialist kind. The interesting question is surely, does this kind of understanding and knowledge count as philosophy? And, if it does, is Strawson’s conception of philosophy and philosophical understanding more similar to Berlin’s conception of the subject than hitherto appreciated? While Strawson doesn’t say much about this topic in ‘Liberty and Necessity’, he does discuss the theme in greater detail elsewhere, especially in ‘Two Conceptions of Philosophy’.26 This essay is primarily concerned with Strawson’s attempt to show the difference between his conception of philosophy and that of Quine’s austerely scientific conception of philosophy. While Strawson believes that Quine’s science-­oriented view of philosophy has merit, he is keen to pursue an alternative conception of the subject that ‘allows for a more liberal ontology than that of the critical, scientific philosopher.’ (TCM 169). He defines his own extra-scientific view of philosophy as follows: Well, the common, as distinct from the scientific, understanding is a complicated affair, embracing an indefinitely large range of ideas or concepts. Within this indefinitely large range, it is possible to distinguish a number of fundamental, general, pervasive concepts or types of concept, which together constitute the structural framework, as it were, within which all ordinary detailed thinking goes on. To name a few at random, I have in mind such ideas as those of space and time, object and property, event, mind, and body, knowledge and belief, truth, sense and meaning, necessity and possibility, existence, identity, action, intention, causation and explanation. Some of these, and some of the more specific concepts which fall under them, can be understood, or at least interpreted, in ways which satisfy Quine’s scientific standards of clarity. Many cannot: they remain, by those standards, vague 26  P. F. Strawson ‘Two Conceptions of Philosophy’ in R. B. Barrett and R. F. Gibson, eds., Perspectives on Quine (1990: Blackwell, Oxford), 310–320 and republished in P. F. Strawson, Philosophical Papers, Galen Strawson ed., (2011: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 166–77. Henceforth referred to as TCP.

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and ill defined. Yet it is possible, without discarding common understanding, so to exhibit the interrelations and interdependences of all-pervasive concepts and concept-types as to make relatively perspicuous the interlocking frameworks of ideas on which we weave our systems of belief. The philosophical aim of those who adhere to my alternative conception of philosophy I take to be that of elucidating the character of such concepts as these and their interconnections. (TCP 169–171)

Strawson’s conception of philosophy contains a number of distinctive features. It primarily concerns itself with the concepts and categories of out thought, albeit in a way that reflects the influence of the narrower linguistic genre. In addition, there is a focus on the task of elucidating the interdependences of our concepts and, finally, an insistence that this task should be carried out descriptively rather than in a fundamentally critical or revisionist way. Let’s now explore briefly the relation between these general elements of Strawson’s view of philosophy and Berlin’s understanding of the subject. The first thing worth emphasising is that they share a view of philosophy that is not narrowly naturalistic. The second thing in common between them is their view that philosophy is concerned with identifying and elucidating the underlying concepts and categories of our structures of thought. Unlike Strawson, Berlin is interested in exploring the more distinctively humanistic and normatively-loaded ideas such as sanity, right and wrong, good and bad, cruelty, survival as well as liberty, equality, nationalism and so on. As we saw in the previous chapter, these more normatively rich concepts are more susceptible to historical variation and change than those concerned with space and time or causation and explanation, namely, ideas that underpin our understanding of the natural world. At first glance, it would seem that Strawson can be more objectively descriptive in his conceptual analysis of such concepts since they are value-free as well as relatively permanent in the way that our more evaluative concepts and categories aren’t. But, as Berlin observed, the difference between our more naturalistically-focused concepts and our humanistically-minded ones in terms of their permanence and universality is a matter of degree not of kind. Moreover, there are concepts that occupy the middle ground such as knowledge, truth and reason which are normatively less value-­laden than concepts such as right and wrong or good and bad but far more value-laden than those of space and time or necessity and possibility. Strawson himself increasingly recognised this point as his career developed but perhaps never

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as much as Berlin did.27 Strawson remained committed to the idea that philosophy is an essentially a priori form of enquiry whereas Berlin gradually arrived at the view that philosophy has an undeniable and irreducible historical dimension since the concepts and categories that are fundamental to its inquiries are historically coloured and vary considerably over time. We shall examine the question of the extent to which it can be said that we are stuck with the most basic structures of our thought in the next chapter. Another interesting point is that both thinkers are committed to identifying the interconnections between our most basic concepts and categories. Strawson’s Individuals is a fine exemplification of his own meta-philosophy with its demonstration of how various elements of our conceptual structure relate to and interlock with each other. Berlin’s writings reflect a similar approach, albeit one that operates from a much broader canvass and is more focused on investigating the historical relations and interdependencies between our more enduring ideals and values and various and competing world views. Moreover, Berlin does not pretend that he can pursue his inquiries in a purely descriptive manner since the very ideas he is concerned with are normatively full-blooded. This forms the basis of his argument that moral and political philosophy is inescapably evaluative and that no coherent or persuasive political or moral philosophy can be value-neutral. It is a matter for debate how purely descriptive Strawson’s theory of ‘descriptive metaphysics’ really is and how successful or even coherent such an enterprise can be. But that question is not something we have time to explore here. The question of whether philosophy is or should be inspiring or edifying is an interesting one. To claim that philosophical enquiry ought to be driven by the unfettered and open-ended quest for truth and knowledge is surely right. But the idea that philosophy can’t  inspiring or edifying doesn’t seem to follow from this. As long as philosophy doesn’t consciously set out to be inspiring or edifying in advance, there is no reason to assume that the outcome of its inquiries should be disqualified from achieving such intellectual and ethical effects. There is an ocean of a gap 27  For example, in Individuals (159) Strawson argues that our core concepts and categories ‘have no history’ whereas by the 1980s he states that even our most fundamental ideas are less stable and unchanging than we might assume. For a fascinating treatment of Strawson’s understanding of the patterns of our thought which is germane to our discussion, see Robin Horton, ‘Material-object Language and Theoretical Language: Towards a Strawsonian Sociology of Thought’ in S. C. Brown ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences (1979: Harvester Press, Sussex), 197–224.

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between the sort of homespun wisdom that infuses, for example, depressingly formulaic ‘philosophical’ commencement speeches, and the kind of enlightenment that derives from reading Plato’s Republic or Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. As we shall see in the following and final section of this chapter, Strawson was as capable as Berlin of producing philosophy that is at once philosophically edifying and morally engaged. But there is no doubt that Strawson had severe (and not unreasonable)  qualms about blurring the distinction between his preferred version of philosophy, namely ‘conceptual analysis’ and the more visionary ‘species of philosophy’ carried out by Heidegger, Sartre and Nietzsche.’28 I wish to conclude this section by quoting from the final paragraph of Strawson’s ‘Two Concepts of Philosophy’, which declares his philosophical pluralism and contextualism as well as his conviction that a philosopher’s philosophical preferences are partly and ineradicably temperamental: It has been said that the best conceptual scheme, the best system of ideas, is the one that gets us around the best. The question is: in what milieu? For one content to lead his life  – at least his intellectual life  – in the rarefied atmosphere of science, the choice, on this test, will go one way. For one content to lead his intellectual life in a muddier atmosphere of the more mundane – of what, in another tradition, has been called expérience vécue – it will go the other way. (TCP 177)

Liberal Freedom and Human Needs The previous chapter touched briefly on the matter of the relationship between Berlin’s view of human nature and his defence of liberalism. I explained that although he did not deny the existence of human nature, he did not think that its empirical or normative features are sufficiently determinate and robust to provide the basis for a single, substantive conception 28  P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (1992: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 2. Strawson says:

There is a species of philosophy which flourishes still, and will no doubt continue to flourish as long as men continue to meditate on their moral nature and situation. I refer to that kind of more or less systematic reflection on the human situation which one finds in the work of, say, Heidegger, Sartre, and Nietzsche, and which, indeed, largely dominated their work – the kind of reflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human life and experience.

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of the ethical virtue and political morality. I wish to end this chapter by briefly addressing the nature and implications of Berlin’s effort to ground his defence of liberal, free society without relying on a normatively thick theory of human nature. This discussion will also examine Strawson’s view of the matter in his essay, ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’, which shares a number of striking resemblances with Berlin’s outlook.29 In that essay, Strawson moves beyond his bailiwick and enters the territory of normative moral and political philosophy. So leaving aside the question of the truth or falsity (or the psychological necessity or illusion) of ultimate free will, a natural question to ask is the political one of the extent, if any, to which it is right to suppose that a society’s appeal and legitimacy can be based on freedom? Is a concern with freedom to pursue one’s own way of life enough to generate the requisite loyalty and solidarity to sustain a stable and peacable political community? There are few places in which Berlin addresses this question more directly and candidly than in the Introduction to his magnum opus, Four Essays on Liberty (1969). One of the aims of that introduction was to disabuse readers of the misapprehension that ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, especially its penultimate paragraph, amounted to ‘an unqualified defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty’ rather than, correctly, as an endorsement of a ‘pluralism based on a perception of incompatibility between the claims of equally ultimate ends, against any ruthless monism which solves such problems by eliminating all but one of the rival claimants’ (L 50).30 Berlin then raises the bald question; ‘[W]hat value there is in liberty as such?’ (L 50). He speculates about the various answers that might plausibly be given to this question ranging from empirically- and anthropologically-based ones to more formal and narrowly analytic ones. He also wonders if the question only makes sense for particular societies at particular times or can be said to be of interest to mankind everywhere and at all times. His own 29  P. F. Strawson, ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’ in Philosophy, vol. XXXVI, 1961 and republished in P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and other essays (1974: Methuen, London), 26–44. Hereafter referred to as SMII. 30  The main revision that Berlin made to the penultimate paragraph of ‘Two Essays on Liberty’ occurred in its opening sentence which he changed from ‘The ‘negative’ liberty that they strive to realize seems to me a truer and more human ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great, disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive’ self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.’ (1958, 57) to ‘Pluralism, with the measure of negative liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal of mankind.’ (1969, L 216).

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response shows a desire to navigate a path between the extremes of historical relativism and ahistorical universalism as well as incorporate both positive and negative notions of liberty: To this it is sufficient, perhaps, to say that those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human; and that this underlies both the positive demand to have a voice in the laws and practices of the society in which one lives, and to be accorded an area, artificially carved out, if need be, in which one is one’s own master, a ‘negative’ area in which man is not obliged to account for his activities to any man so far as this is compatible with the existence of organised society. (L 52)

Berlin adds one major qualification to his defence of negative liberty by underlining the pluralistic point that like all other human values and ideals negative liberty is neither inviolable nor sufficient in any absolute sense. He also emphasises that there are circumstances when negative liberty and the space for personal auntonomy and choice that it protects may need to be compromised or curtailed for the sake of fulfilling more urgent or a greater set of human needs. Whether or not one agrees with Berlin’s verdict on this specific matter, we are still left with the question of the political value and relevance of negative freedom. More fundamentally, to what extent can we say that humankind values freedom of choice for its own sake? Surely, freedom for the Oxford don is very different from freedom for the tramp? And what about Herzen’s sceptical reflections that it has only ever been minorities scattered here and there that have shown a genuine interest in and readiness to fight for the cause of personal freedom? It would seem self-evident that most people most of the time throughout history have shown a far greater willingness to embrace paternalistic or traditional forms of rule. In a wonderful riposte to Rousseau, Herzen makes the point that the notion that ‘man is born free but is everywhere in chains’ is equivalent to claiming that ‘Fish were born to fly, yet everywhere they swim.’ (RT2 107) Berlin takes this challenge seriously but he doesn’t believe it is decisive. It can be partially defused, he argues, by affirming the pluralist point that liberty does not enjoy a monopoly when it comes to political ideals and that there exists a wide range of actual or conceivable circumstances in which even lovers of liberty might be prepared to temporarily sacrifice their own liberties for the greater good of their community. More generally, a civilised

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and morally decent society can only be achieved by seeking to find a feasible equilibrium between the legitimate and competing needs, claims and ideals of its members and those of the collective. But his main argument tends to centre on reminding those who know and, more relevantly, those who don’t, of the dehumanising effects that the absence of freedom has on our lives. Tragically, many people don’t appreciate the true, existential value of liberty until they have lost it. And it is worth emphasising that Berlin could be as critical of modern Western states which frequently neglect or even forget about the intrinsic value of individual freedom in their single-minded pursuit of technical progress and macroeconomic efficiency, as he was of more obvious and deadly forms of state control and oppression. His unswerving attachment to the value of personal liberty is informed by a philosophical belief that there is no one uniquely valid conception of the good life as well as an aversion to all kinds of totalitarianism which have no place for the privacies and secrecies of our personal lives. Finally, as I mentioned already, Berlin was not slow to emphasise Bishop Butler’s point that we need to resist the temptation of denying that we have in fact diminished our liberty even when we feel morally or politically compelled to sacrifice it for some other ideal. Nothing is gained and much can be lost, not least in self-deception, from assimilating objectively separate and conflicting human ideals and deluding ourselves that, for example, justice or equality can envelope or override liberty or compassion without any real loss. No doubt, freedom for the economically comfortable is not liberty for the poor and without a minimal level of social welfare, civil liberties can seem distinctly meaningless to the least well-off.31 Berlin does not deny any of this, stating in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’: 31  Berlin’s answer is not unambiguous but it suggests that, at the very least, having a right to negative liberty does the peasant no harm and if things improve for him tomorrow then its relevance is likely to increase. But what happens if he remains a poverty-stricken peasant for his entire life? Would he not be better living under an egalitarian rather than a primarily libertarian dispensation in such circumstances? The other question of course is to what extent can we continue to prioritise or indulge liberty in a world that is burning up in front of us? Who could argue that we need to curtail our freedoms in radical ways if we wish to preserve the planet or, at a minimum, defer Armageddon for as long as possible? This is less a criticism of Berlin than a recognition that we face an increasingly lethal existential threat that requires us to radically transform how we live. This needn’t imply that negative liberty and the freedom of choice on which it rests has or will become redundant – indeed it may well become more important. Another feature of Berlin’s defence of negative liberty that leaves him vulnerable is his relative neglect of equality, especially economic equality. Berlin wrote ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’

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It is true that to offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition; they need medical help or education before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom. What is freedom to those who cannot make use of it? Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom? (L 171)32

But granting this point should not prompt us, Berlin argues, to conflate the need for more equality and compassion with the separate priority to preserve an inviolable personal space for everybody: First things come first: there are situations in which – to use a saying satirically attributed to the nihilists by Dostoevsky  – boots are superior to Pushkin; individual freedom is not everyone’s primary need. For freedom is not the mere absence of frustration of whatever kind; this would inflate the meaning of the word until it meant too much or too little. The Egyptian peasant needs clothes or medicine before, and more than, personal liberty, but the minimum freedom that he needs today, and the greater degree of freedom that he may need tomorrow, is not some species of freedom peculiar to him, but identical with that of professors, artists and millionaires. (L 172–3)

Informing Berlin’s deep attachment to liberty is a conviction, maybe even a truth of modernity, which he inherited from Herzen. Let me quote a pertinent passage from Herzen’s From the Other Shore and then follow up with Berlin’s championing of the same sentiment: Life does not provide for anything lasting in the personal sphere; it pours out all it has at the present moment and, bestowing on man the ability to enjoy himself, as best he can, neither ensures life nor enjoyment, nor their duration. […] The present belongs to it. But people demand more – they want the future, too, to belong to them. Man suffers because he cannot at a time when the Cold War was going through one its hottest periods and, therefore, individual liberty in the West had a certain paramount appeal and importance attached to it. But, as critics like Ronald Dworkin and Charles Taylor have argued, there are times and places when economic and political equality should take political precedence over an abiding concern with freedom, especially in situations where economic inequalities are systemic and pronounced. 32  Berlin amplifies this point in his Introduction to Four Essays of Liberty: see esp. L 37–8.

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descry, even in the future, that harbour which he is trying to make. He gazes ahead, sadly disquieted, along the endless path, and sees that he is just as far from his aim after all his efforts as he was a thousand, nay, two thousand years before. And what is the aim of the singer’s song. Sounds, nothing but sounds. Sounds that fade away the moment they escape the singer’s lips. If instead of enjoying these sounds, you search for something else in them, wait for something else, you will find yourself at the end of the song with memories and regrets that, instead of listening, you stood waiting for something …You are misled by categories which have a poor grasp of life.33

And now Berlin: The purpose of life is life itself, the purpose of the struggle for liberty is the liberty here, today, of living individuals, each with his own individual ends, for the sake of which they move and fight and suffer, ends which are sacred for them; to crush their freedom, stop their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some ineffable felicity of the future, is blind, because it outrages the only values we know, tramples on real human lives and needs, and in the name of what? Of freedom, of happiness, justice – fanatical generalisations, mystical sounds, abstractions. Why is personal freedom worth pursuing? Only for what it is in itself, because it is what it is, not because the majority desires freedom. (RT2 107)34

Strawson addresses the question of the justification and appeal of liberal freedom in his own analytically compressed and adroit style but it is remarkable how closely his core position resembles  that of  Berlin. His 33  ‘From the Other Shore’ in Alexander Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, L. Navrozov trans. (1956: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow), 361–2. 34  The playwright, Tom Stoppard, put his own inimitable mark on Herzen’s wise and humane sentiment near the end of Shipwreck, the second instalment in his dramatic trilogy The Coast of Utopia:

No, not at all! Koyla’s life was what it was. Because children grow up.. we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives on for a day. It pours the whole of life itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow – later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s danced? Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, (2002: Faber, London), 216.

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essay also shows that he was more than capable of engaging in a ‘species of philosophy’ that amounts to a ‘more or less systematic reflection on the human situation.’35 He opens his essay by reminding us of the not uninspiring thought that our ethical imagination allows us to live many more lives than the one we would be limited to living without it. Our imaginative capacity, he argues, can prompt changes in our own ethical outlook over our lifetimes as well as sensitise us to with very different, even incompatible, ethical outlooks of others including those found in fiction and biographies.36 More often than not we can sympathetically identify or, at the very least, understand very different ethical visions and ways of life without necessarily changing how we ourselves live our own practical lives. One of the major reasons why we find ourselves attracted to a variety of diverse and frequently competing conceptions of the good life is because each one encapsulates or expresses something true and significant about us as human beings. What this serves to show, negatively, is that there is no single, supreme and all-encompassing ethical or, more broadly, metaphysical picture of the human good. More positively, it testifies to the fact that there exist irreducibly plural and valid pictures of ethical life. As Strawson states: the region of the ethical is the region where there are truths but no truth; or, in other words, that the injunction to see life steadily and see it whole is absurd, for one cannot do both. (FR 29)

It is also clear that Strawson shares Berlin’s metaethical diagnosis that ethical diversity and disagreement amount to a valuable truth and not merely an incorrigible fact about modernity, albeit one that does not entail that

35  P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy (1992: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 2. 36  Strawson’s brief mention of how literature can open our minds to different ethical visions and ways of life is more relevant to liberalism than the brevity of his remarks might suggest. One of the ways in which liberalism can respond to the criticism that it fails to say much about how we might fill the space that it secures for us to lead our own lives is by highlighting the value of imaginative literature. For an excellent discussion of this theme see Paul Seabright, ‘The aloofness of liberal politics: can imaginative literature furnish a private space?’ in John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister, Literature and the Political Imagination (1996: Routledge, London), 145–69.

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conflicting moral attitudes behave like incompatible propositions since the latter cannot be jointly true:37 The region of the ethical, then, is the region of diverse, certainly incompatible and possibly practically conflicting ideal images or pictures of a human life, or of human life; and it is a region in which many such incompatible pictures may secure at least the imaginative, though doubtless not often the practical, allegiance of a single person. Moreover, this statement itself may be seen not merely as a description of what is the case, but as a positive evaluation of evaluative diversity. Any diminution in this variety would impoverish the human scene. The multiplicity of conflicting pictures is itself the essential element in one of one’s pictures of man. (FR 29)

Strawson’s recognition of ‘evaluative diversity’ leads him to a consideration of how a society can be organised in the context of its members holding diverse and rival ethical visions which are both pervasive and ineliminable. He frames this question in terms of the relationship between ‘the region of the ethical’ and ‘the sphere of morality where the former is composed of the various and competing ideal pictures of ethical life and the later are made up of the rules that apply to all members of a particular society. In other words, Strawson regards ‘the ethical’ as the area which centres on the ideals of the individual whereas he views ‘the moral’ as concerned with the laws and social norms that bind a community together. His initial attempt at answering the question defines the sphere of morality on the basis of what he refers to as ‘the minimal interpretation of morality’ which encapsulates the rules and conduct that make society possible on purely pragmatic grounds, that is, as having no role or value independently of fulfilling its limited yet indispensable  public convenience. (FR 30) Strawson finds this instrumental account of social morality unfeasible since it does not have sufficient moral cement to secure and sustain the requisite loyalty of all members of society. But before he moves onto discussing less minimal versions of social morality he makes a number of typically shrewd and provocative remarks, not least his contention that far too much has been made by moral philosophers in abstracto regarding the alleged challenge of employing such ideas as moral duty and obligation in a Godless universe; he argues that even the minimal idea of social morality offers a 37  Cogito Interview with Peter Strawson in Andrew Pyle ed., Key Philosophers in Conversation: The Cogito Interviews (1999: Routledge, London), 43.

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perfectly satisfactory and unmysterious explanation of why the notions of conscientiousness, duty and obligation operate unproblematically in society without its members being ‘haunted by the ghost of the idea of supernatural ordinances.’ (FR 33)38 Like Berlin, Strawson shows a healthy scepticism of grandiose abstractions and a civilised recognition of the deep and unheralded presence of the normative habits of everyday human life. Strawson thinks the inadequacies of the minimal idea of social morality manifest themselves most clearly when we ask the question: what interest has the individual in morality? This old poser prompts us to consider what motivation all individuals might have in society and not just the ‘imaginatively restless and materially cosy.’ (FR 34). And we are then inevitably led to consider a variety of more fundamental themes and questions including the source and authority of society’s demands on the individual, the nature and scope of an individual member’s status and role in authorising and obeying the rules and regulations of society, the extent to which all members of society may be said to owe moral and prudential commitment to a community in virtue of being a member of it and so on. I do not propose to discuss any further the details of Strawson’s intriguing, if schematic, account of the relationship between social morality and individual ideals.39 My focus has been simply to register the affinities between his and Berlin’s views about the political implications of value pluralism or what Strawson calls ‘the conflicting ideals of life’. The closing paragraph of Strawson’s essay might just as easily have been written by Berlin: What will be the attitude of one who experiences sympathy with a variety of conflicting ideals of life? It seems that he will be most at home in a liberal society, in a society in which there are variant moral environments but in which no ideal endeavours to engross, and determine the character of, the common morality. He will not argue in favour of such a society that it gives the best chance for the truth about life to prevail, for he will not consistently  Strawson is quite explicit that his main target here is Elizabeth Anscombe’s influential paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Philosophy vol. XXXII, January 1958 which argued that the very foundations of modern moral philosophy with its emphasis on moral duties and obligations crumbled with the loss of belief in a Christian God. 39  While Strawson’s discussion regarding the source and authority of society’s demands on the individual is subtle and interesting, it lacks structure and scope. One of its more fundamental shortcomings is a failure to register the centrality of the distinction between what Herbert Hart calls positive morality  and critical morality, where the former refers to ‘the morality actually accepted and shared by a given social group’ and the latter to ‘the general principles used in the criticism of actual social institutions including positive morality.’ See H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (1963: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 20. 38

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believe that there is such a thing as the truth about life. Nor will he argue in its favour that it has the best chance of producing a harmonious kingdom of ends, for he will not think ends as necessarily capable of being harmonized. He will simply welcome the ethical diversity which the society makes possible, and in proportion as he values that diversity he will note that he is the natural, though perhaps the sympathetic, enemy of all those whose single intense vision of the ends of life drives them to try to make the requirements of the ideal coextensive with those of common social morality. (FR 44)40

In a well-known essay in the New York Review of Books, Myles Burnyeat asserted that philosophy should strive to achieve vision as well as argument.41 What he meant by this is that contemporary philosophers need to be as preoccupied with the broad theme of how we live our lives as well as with the more orthodox one of engaging in rigorous argument. Achieving a blend of imaginative vision and scrupulous argumentation is never easy, since they can pull in opposite directions. Vision without argument becomes ‘grandiloquent posturing’ while reason divorced from imaginative understanding turns into ‘a mere skeleton of a philosophy.’ Truly talented  philosophers find a way of striking a balance between the separate  demands and commitments of both philosophical impulses. Strawson’s papers on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ and ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’ show what can happen when an extraordinarily supple and wide-ranging analytical mind ventures into the more ‘visionary’ sphere of moral and political philosophy. We are left to regret that he did not occupy it more often and more expansively since his forays into the realm of normative philosophy are invariably deep and instructive.  The following passage from Strawson’s ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ is revealing:

40

In 1977 I received the honor of knighthood; immediately after the investiture in December I departed for Yugoslavia, where I gave lectures in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb. I registered a certain difference in atmosphere in the three places. At least in academic circles the intellectual style seemed relatively untrammelled in Belgrade and Zagreb, though the political tone was different. In Sarajevo, where I was only allowed to give one of my two scheduled lectures and had minimal contact with fellow academics, one perhaps time-serving young man in my audience suggested that my lecture revealed an essentially bourgeois outlook. I replied, ‘But I am bourgeois – an elitist liberal bourgeois’. My interpreter commented, sotto voce, ‘They envy you’. P. F. Strawson, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ in The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson, L. E. Hahn, ed. (1998: Open Court, Carbondale, Illinois), 15–6. 41  Myles Burnyeat, ‘The Virtues of Plato’, New York Review of Books, September 27, 1979.

CHAPTER 5

Berlin and Quentin Skinner on History

Neither apathy nor antipathy can ever bring out the truth of history. Eoin MacNeill, Phases of Irish History

Plamenatz’s Proposal John Plamenatz, Isaiah Berlin’s successor to the Chichele chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, made the following remark in the Introduction to the first volume of his acclaimed Man & Society: Political and Social Theories from Machiavelli to Marx: […]. Every thinker, even the most abstract, is deeply influenced by the circumstances of his day. To understand why Machiavelli or Hobbes or Rousseau wrote as he did, we must know something of social and political conditions in their day and country and of the controversies then to the fore. But this does not, I hope, mean that whoever discusses their theories must also discuss these conditions and controversies. Is there to be no division of labour? Those conditions and controversies have often been described, and the writer who is primarily concerned with arguments and ideas need not discuss them except to make something clear which might otherwise be misunderstood. He must use his judgement: at times he may

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need to make a considerable digression, and at other times a passing reference or mere hint will be enough.1

On the face of it, Plamenatz’s proposal would seem to make much sense. Political theorists cannot plough several intellectual fields at once and the suggestion that they must strikes us as straightforwardly silly. Political theorists are, after all, concerned with the question of the coherence and truth of past political ideas and not with the separate and philosophically marginal matter of the historical context from which the ideas emerged and developed. Since Plamenatz’s book is primarily a work of philosophy, not history, who in their right mind could possibly contest the wisdom of his proposal? There is a nice two-word answer to this seemingly rhetorical question: Quentin Skinner. Working out why Skinner, formerly Professor of Political Science and subsequently Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, would want to deny the apparent validity of Plamenatz’s suggestion is quite a complicated matter. Determining whether or not his denial is justified is even trickier. But before I try to answer these questions, I need to say a little more about why I am raising them in the first place. My reason is threefold. Firstly, the rationale underlying Plamenatz’s proposal contains several implicit but common assumptions within the analytic tradition about the nature of philosophy and history, assumptions that most commentators would also assume are made by Isaiah Berlin. Secondly, Skinner offers a compelling case, both methodologically and substantively, for the claim that Plamenatz’s proposal is not only superficial but, in a pivotal way, indefensible. Thirdly and consequently (if Skinner is basically right), it would seem that a major question mark emerges concerning the cogency of Berlin’s political philosophy, especially in so far as it claims to derive authority from history. Our starting-point is the set of broadly-based assumptions that inform the premise of Plamenatz’s recommendation about the division of intellectual tasks concerning the history of political thought. My focus of interest is less with the peculiarly individual aspects of Plamenatz’s viewpoint than with his more general and generalisable suppositions concerning the relation of philosophy to its past, suppositions that underpin the typical 1  John Plamenatz, Man and Society: Political and Social Theories from Machiavelli to Marx, Vol. 1, From the Middle Ages to Locke, (1963: 1992 ed.: Longman, London), XV. Hereafter referred to as MAS1.

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view of history adopted by analytically trained political theorists. Roughly speaking, the mainstream view of analytic political theorists such as Plamenatz to history can be summarised as follows: • As a branch of philosophy, political philosophy or political theory—I shall refer to these interchangeably—is concerned with examining the central questions regarding the individual and his relationship with the state. These questions range from the most abstract such as ‘What is the best form of government?’, ‘What is the source of political obligation?’, ‘What are the limits of political authority and power?’,’ to the more specific such as ‘On what basis should people possess property?’ ‘Is capitalism compatible with genuine democracy?’, ‘Is reverse discrimination morally defensible?’ and so on and so forth. • Given that political theory has been around for quite a while, contemporary political theorists enjoy the convenient option of analysing how their forebears have tried to answer the most general and perennial problems of political philosophy. Hence many political philosophers make it their business to discuss what Plato can tell us about the dangers of democracy, what Aquinas has to say about the source of political authority, or the lessons that Locke has to impart about liberalism, and so forth. • Obviously, not all the problems of political theory are perennial ones: we are more concerned today with matters of gender and multiculturalism than Aristotle or Hobbes were. Similarly, the writings of long-dead political thinkers betray interests and concerns that were peculiar to their own times and that are of no intrinsic interest to us. But none of these historical differences negate the presence and permanent relevance of the much deeper themes and preoccupations that form the canon of Western political theory. • Hence, political theory is similar and dissimilar to its first cousin, political science. Like political science, political philosophy is primarily a cognitive discipline that is concerned with identifying and assessing the defensibility of its subject matter. Unlike political science, it is more keenly focused on normative questions than on matters of an empirical nature. Typically, political scientists will not critically enhance their professional knowledge and prestige by studying the methodologies of their historical precursors. The same cannot be said of political theorists but the answer to the question of how

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exactly the history of political thought critically enhances their putative expertise remains cloudy at best. • The elusiveness of history’s pertinence to contemporary political theorists helps explain how a familiarity with the history of political thought remains entirely optional for members of their profession. Professional political theorists can enjoy a flourishing career with little or no interest in or knowledge of the history of their subject. Conversely, historically-minded political theorists can happily prosper even if the level of professional engagement with their more present-minded colleagues resembles that of a gentlemen’s agreement to stay schtum on certain topics. That, in brief, is the typical attitude to history among contemporary analytic political philosophers. And it is also the view that lies behind Plamenatz’s seemingly sensible proposal. For once we accept the set of assumptions adumbrated above, we also look at history as a separate and subsidiary field of study. The discrete labours of historians, including intellectual historians, are largely irrelevant to the more profound work of the political philosopher with an interest in the past. The story which political philosophers want to tell is, for the most part, indifferent to and unhampered by the constraints of mere doxographical intellectual history. Their concerns operate on a higher plain of human enquiry, preoccupied as they are with universal and perennial truth. While their quasi-ethereal musings may occasionally need to be modified in the light of some undeniable piece of historical evidence, they can weather any historically generated turbulence. In this respect, their exposure to and concern for the actual past could be likened to the experience of a perpetual passenger on a jet plane at very high altitude (and on virtual auto-pilot) who is vaguely aware of, but effectively unharried by, the goings-on in the world below.

Skinner’s Sting I imagine that at this stage the reader will not need to await word from Professor Skinner to suspect that that there is something rotten or, at least, seriously amiss in the state of analytic history of political thought. This suspicion is by no means unfounded, but our interest in Skinner goes well beyond the basic need for confirmation that Plamenatz’s original proposal

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is questionable, perhaps even indecent.2 Skinner’s significance for our purposes is far more consequential than that. Besides, we shouldn’t need someone like Skinner to tell us that analytically inspired histories of political thought behave more like mythologies than anything else. For how else should one describe something that is composed of so many largely fantastical, free-floating and contradictory tales while at the same time being virtually immune to the overwhelming evidence of historical reality? Surely, we don’t need to waste time and ink on justifying what must be blatantly obvious to anyone who has come into contact with any real history? To suppose that Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Mill were somehow magically preoccupied with the same or similar ‘perennial problems of political thought’ requires an indefensible suspension of historical disbelief.3 2  Quentin Skinner’s contemporary at Cambridge, John Dunn, gives a particularly astringent summary of what is wrong with conventional, typically analytic, histories of political of theory:

To understand the political condition of the world in which we live – and still more, to learn how to meet the human challenges which that condition presents – we need bolder, clearer, imaginatively more searching, and humanly more engaging insight than any now offered by the modern social sciences or the current practices of professional politicians or bureaucrats. In the face of that need, it is both intellectually inept, and humanly profligate to an unforgiveable degree, to view the canon of the history of political theory just as an impressive (or sinister) cultural fossil, or an occasion for narcissistic chauvinism. These great texts may often elicit an indolent and smug devotion. But what they invite, indeed what, taken together, they require from us, is a brave and active response: that we should learn to understand modern politics less shallowly, and act more effectively to improve its outcomes. John Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays, (1996: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 34. 3  Some of the more culpable yet influential examples of such ahistorical analytic accounts of past thinkers include the textbook history of political theory by George H. Sabine A History of Political Theory (1937: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York), Karl Popper’s indictment of the fifth-century BC thinker, Plato, as a precursor of twentieth-century totalitarianism, A E Taylor’s essays in K. C. Brown ed. Hobbes Studies (1965: Oxford University Press, Oxford), which argue that Hobbes is a pre-Kantian deontologist, C. B. Macpherson’s central claim in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962: Oxford University Press, Oxford), that Hobbes and Locke are essentially bourgeois apologists. Other less flagrantly ludicrous, if random, examples of ‘armchair’ analytic treatments of past thinkers include Bernard Williams’ Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978: Penguin, London) which manages to refer to Montaigne only once and even then only trivially, David Gauthier’s The Logic of Leviathan (1969: Oxford University Press, Oxford) portraying

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Does this mean that analytic histories of political thought are worthless? The answer, of course, depends on how one defines ‘worthless’. They are indeed mostly frivolous in the sense of telling us much, if anything, of interest about the actual past. It could, of course, be argued that they derive their chief value from fulfilling certain pedagogical purposes: knowing something rather than nothing or next to nothing about ‘the history of political thought from Plato to NATO’ is no doubt a relatively good thing. And over the last fifty years or more, several thought-provoking analytic histories of political thought such as Plamenatz’s Man and Society, Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision and, more recently, Alan Ryan’s Politics have performed this task commendably.4 But surely such benefits bear very little, if any, connection with what Plato and those who happened to come before and after him were most likely doing when they reflected on what is unselfconsciously referred to as ‘politics’. Perhaps, one of the more productive activities that could be pursued in relation to the tradition of the analytic history of political thought is a quasi-anthropological investigation into why the subject emerged in the first place and, more alarmingly, why it continues to flourish. My hunch is that such an enquiry would reveal that its origins are largely moralistic and pragmatic, and that its continued existence owes more to institutional and academic inertia than it does to any nobler intellectual explanation. In this regard, analytic Hobbes as a proto-rational choice theorist and Hobbes’ account of the ‘state of nature’ as a classic prisoner’s dilemma, and Richard Hare’s Plato (1982: Oxford University Press, Oxford) which makes the ancient Greek thinker sound more like a not very smart philosophy undergraduate at one of Hare’s unforgiving and, no doubt, ‘ethically prescriptive’ one-toone tutorials. Of course, recognising the historical infidelity of these works (or sections of them) does not mean that they are philosophically worthless. In fact, some of them are philosophically instructive even if they are mainly historically absurd. 4  Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960: 2004 ed.: Princeton University Press, New Jersey); Alan Ryan, Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present (2013: Penguin, London). Interestingly, Wolin quoted the following line from T.S. Eliot’s, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ at the beginning of his new edition of Politics and Vision: ‘And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/and for a hundred visions and revisions’. Rather ironically, these lines perfectly capture the incoherent state of analytic history of political thought. Another way of describing these works is that they are good bad histories of political thought. Being densely ahistorical was/is not limited to analytical histories of political thought. See, for example, D. J. O’Connor ed. A Critical History of Western Philosophy (1964: Free Press, New York), and more recently, Anthony Kenny’s monumental A New History of Western Philosophy (2012: Oxford University Press, Oxford) which typify the naively unproblematic attitude of Anglophone analytic philosophers to history.

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history of political thought resembles a degenerate research programme in the Lakatosian sense that it is based on unfounded theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned without giving up the entire genre itself. This isn’t to suggest that practitioners of analytic history of political thought are all cynics or deliberately engaged in a form of trahison des clercs, but rather that they unfailingly and perhaps unconsciously fall prey to its complacent follies and falsehoods. Our reason for focusing on Skinner’s work is not so much that it exposes the peculiarly ahistorical nostrums of analytic political theory. Rather his primary importance for us lies in prompting us to think about the implications of the historical vacuousness and worthlessness of conventional histories of past political thinkers. It is difficult to read Skinner’s oeuvre without being prompted to ask at least three fundamental questions: Do the manifest historical absurdities of analytic ‘histories’ imply that the past is irrelevant to political philosophy? Is authentic history of political thought possible? And if a genuinely historical account of political thought is a viable project, then does it have any bearing on our understanding of contemporary political ideals and issues? Skinner provides cogent answers to each of these questions. We shall discuss each of his answers in turn. While one of our principal debts to Skinner is undoubtedly his systematic demolition of textual, as distinct from contextual, histories of political thought (by ‘textual histories’ I mean the analytic, ahistorical histories described above), it is, in particular, his diagnosis of the pathologies motivating such textual histories that is, to start with, most illuminating for our purposes.5 The most revealing of these pathologies is the seemingly insatiable desire to connect ‘the past’ with the present in some crucially meaningful and, usually, chauvinistically self-fulfilling way. Making and sustaining such connections requires us to treat the past as if we were the victors who possess the unfettered freedom to plunder the battlefield 5  Quentin Skinner is not the only thinker who has been busy slaying historically anachronistic dragons. He and his former colleague, John Dunn, founded the contextual or Cambridge school of political thought. Over the last fifty years or so its basic agenda—pursued, it should be said, far more by Skinner than Dunn—has been to provide genuinely historical accounts of past political thought through the production of both historically authoritative editions of the original works of long dead political thinkers and original, historically grounded intellectual history. Another scholar who deserves mention here is John Pocock whose work preceded the emergence of the Cambridge school but which overlaps with and indeed brilliantly exemplifies the core assumptions and aims of contextually-minded history of ideas.

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with impunity, choosing the spoils of war that happen to take our fancy and disregarding everything else as wanton waste. In this way, ‘the past’ becomes an arbitrary, if much prized, collection of steadfast ideas that serve as reassuring reminders of how we got here and why we are so lucky, even privileged, that we did. And even those who for some reason may regard these resolute regulative ideas as a source of shame rather than pride rarely consider the possibility that ‘the past’ may include more than what it itself is capable of accommodating within its relatively narrow and constricting boundaries. In other words, both defenders and detractors of conventional histories of political thought operate within the same broadly-based interpretive or professional community. This unheralded but homogeneous interpretive community can accommodate a wide range of views, but they all tend to fall squarely within its implicit and self-­policing limits. This helps account for the level of agreement and disagreement that exists among conventional analytic histories of political thought. Orthodox accounts of the history of political thought not only converge on the central canon of texts to be studied, characteristically beginning with Plato’s Republic and concluding with either Mill’s On Liberty or Marx’s Communist Manifesto. They also tend to share a core set of views about these classic texts—for example, almost none are likely to argue that Plato’s objections to democratic rule are justified, while all are likely to agree that either Mill or Marx provides—or some variation of either—far superior answers to the eternal questions of political philosophy. Then there are the minority who deviate in various idiosyncratic ways from the mainstream view. They may choose to argue, for example, that Plato or Aristotle are more right than wrong compared with their modern successors on the basic truths of politics and morals. But even these seemingly peripheral figures behave like in-house rebels. Their basic categories and concepts of thought (or, alternatively, the largely inviolable academic assumptions and standards of analytic political theory) remain fundamentally continuous with those of their more conformist opponents. The major point is that they all operate to a greater or lesser extent in a stridently ahistorical vacuum. What Skinner’s critique of such historically unanchored ‘histories’ demonstrates is that their fatal flaw is not so much that they are so uninteresting but, more fundamentally, that they buy their brand of relevance at the price of telling the truth about the past. So, Skinner’s response to the first question is that while ‘the past’ is necessarily meaningful to ‘textual histories’ of political thought, there is little or no evidence to suggest—and plenty of evidence to the

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contrary—that the actual past, or what we know of it from authentic historical research, bears much, if any, of a relationship, let alone relevance, to implausibly neat accounts of past political ideas. The inevitable result of treating the past as the eternally present is that you end up forfeiting it: it becomes a mere plaything, what we want it to be rather than what it is. This leads us nicely to our next question: Is there such a thing as a historically faithful account of political thought? The short answer, according to Skinner, is yes. Unpacking his affirmative response reveals the constructively positive side of his methodological and historical agenda. For Skinner an authentically historical history of political thought involves more than just familiarity with the canonical texts of long-dead thinkers. It also entails knowing about the context of the so-called great texts of political theory. Knowing the context of a text is not as straightforward as that word commonly suggests. It is certainly a more complex affair than Plamenatz suggests. Without wishing to get too heavily into the methodological reeds of Skinner’s historical approach, we can describe his methodology as involving a number of key steps. The first of these announces the radical nature of his departure from a historical or anti-­ historical textualism: it stipulates that we must at least try to uncover what the actual author was trying to do when he wrote his text, as distinct from what we happen to take the text’s meaning and arguments to be about. This in turn entails the need to acquaint ourselves with some real history, either by doing some original research to identify the intentions of a particular author, or by relying on the labours of other genuine historians. It’s important to emphasise here that identifying authors’ intentions in writing their books is not the same as seeking to discover their motives or even beliefs. Intention means, in this context, working out what the author meant when he wrote what he wrote. Put more technically, it means trying to recover the original illocutionary force of the text in question. This term ‘illocutionary’ here derives from J.  L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words. According to Austin’s theory of speech acts, locution refers to what is said, illocution to what is meant, and perlocution to what happens as a result. So, for example, when a customer says to a waiter at a restaurant ‘Is there a menu?’, the illocutionary act (the meaning) is effectively ‘Can I have a menu please?’ even though the locutionary act (the literal sentence) was to enquire about the existence of a menu, while the perlocutionary act (the consequence) is what, if anything, happened as a result of the illocutionary force of the customer’s statement. Skinner’s historical methodology is significantly and explicitly influenced by the writings of

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J. L. Austin as well as those of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. More specifically, Skinner is indebted to Austin and Wittgenstein for interpreting language as having two vital dimensions, firstly, the essentially Austinian notion of speech acts possessing illocutionary meaning and force and secondly, the more characteristically Wittgensteinian idea that we must look at how language is used—and how it can be seen as a kind of social action or intervention—in a particular linguistic tradition or form of life. In the following passage Skinner articulates the impact of the ideas of Wittgenstein and Austin (as well as John Searle) on his own work with characteristic clarity and brevity: Wittgenstein had enjoined us to ask not about the meanings but the uses of words. Austin and Searle had extended this insight into a general theory of speech acts, examining the multifarious ways in which we may be said to be doing something as well as saying something in the act of issuing any serious utterance. From their work I acquired the confidence to argue that textual interpretation should be concerned not merely with the recovery of the alleged meanings of texts, but also – and perhaps principally – with the range of things that texts may be said to be doing, and thus with the nature of interventions they may be said to constitute.6

Once we take on the Austinian point, the need for the intellectual historian to read what other thinkers were saying at the time becomes irresistible, because it is imperative to get a firm and reliable gauge of what the representative views and linguistic practices were at the time, so that we can, in turn, determine what counts as orthodox thought or otherwise. In other words, extensive and methodologically sophisticated and sustained readings of contemporary texts are vital to getting a handle on what might distinguish a genuinely original or unconventional thought from the customary and commonplace. Such historically sensitive investigations enable us to recognise that texts, even putatively canonical ones, never emerge out of a contextual vacuum. Rather they form part of some prevailing, inescapable tradition or set of distinct and competing traditions to which they contribute by either conforming to and/or repudiating it or them. Finally, Skinner insists that political ideas themselves can have a significant bearing on what is viewed as permissible political behaviour by historical 6  Quentin Skinner, ‘Surveying the Foundations: a retrospect and a reassessment’ in Annabel Brett and James Tully eds. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2006: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 242.

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actors. In short, ideas and actions interact and affect one another or adopting J. L. Austin’s perspective, words are deeds. And this is surely one of the most vital insights of Skinner’s contextual approach to the history of ideas—he understands past political texts as deeds which are necessarily situated in a particular linguistic and ideological situation and produced with a specific goal in mind rather than as free-floating, principled and rather random flights of ahistorical theoretical fancy. Skinner forces us to confront the very real likelihood that historians of philosophy have, on the whole, been asking the wrong question. The pressing nature of this point is particularly obvious in his work on Hobbes in the 1960s which makes a very strong case that scholars need to take much more seriously the possibility that there might be no categorical distinction to be drawn -- at least in the history of moral and political philosophy -- between philosophy and ideology. And thus, that the best question to ask even about highly abstract works might be: but ‘what are they up to’? The unmistakable thrust of his methodological and historical work implies that the most likely answer is: something partisan.7 The great virtue of Skinner’s historical writings is that they express and validate his methodology in a clear and concrete way. Let me draw attention to two particularly vivid examples of how Skinner’s interpretive theory works in practice. The first example is perhaps the best known and is 7  Once we reflect on past political thinkers and their works through a Skinnerian or Austinian lens, it becomes clearer why there is such a radical disjunction between the Cambridge school’s view of the history of political thought and the conventional analytic one. One of the main reasons why so many of the analytic histories of political theory are at the very least historically worthless is because their authors do not see the great works of political thought as speech acts, as deeds with a situated meaning and particular purpose(s). One can speculate that another reason why most analytic ‘historians’ of philosophy are unable or unwilling to see through the historical absurdity of much of their own work is because they look at the writings of long dead political thinkers through their own drastically narrow, academically introverted and fundamentally apolitical frame of reference. In other words, most contemporary histories of political theory are not driven by or connected with the kinds of pressing existential political factors that were directly behind, for example, Machiavelli’s or Hobbes or Locke’s writings. The validity of this critical observation does not rely of course on denying that certain, perhaps many, academic analytic historians of political thought write their papers and books primarily for non-institutional reasons, that is, while they may not be opposed to their own academic promotion and prestige their overriding motives are purely scholarly and/or even edifying—they may hope their writings will change the world for the better or help us understand it more fully and perceptively, or indeed they may simply love what they do and can’t imagine devoting their professional life to anything else.

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taken from the first volume of his seminal work, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.8 It concerns the infamous Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, who has had more anachronistic sins committed against him than most political thinkers: over the years he has been called Satan, a pure parodist, the father of political science, a proto-nationalist, the originator of realpolitik, a candid chronicler of gangsterism in high politics and so on and so forth. Skinner slashes his way through the thick forest of conflicting readings and manages to situate Machiavelli and his ideas in their actual historical context. What emerges from his formidably original and wideranging historical enquiry is a thinker who was both typical and atypical of his time and place. Skinner manages to delineate the various ways in which The Prince conformed to the humanist genre of ‘mirror for princes’ literature and precisely where it deviated from and repudiated the conventional assumptions and norms of that rich and influential tradition.9 This gives us a picture of historical fidelity where the true originality of The Prince is found, which is largely in the author’s radical redefinition of the classical and Christian understanding of virtù, a redefinition that blew apart the hitherto unbreakable link between the requirements of expediency (the utile) and the demands of morality (the honestum). This allows him to reconstruct a far more historically precise and plausible account of what Machiavelli was trying to accomplish in writing his short masterpiece following his political exile after the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512; that is, to compose a compelling application form to secure employment under the new Medici rulers of Florence. Skinner’s deployment of the same approach to Machiavelli’s later work, The Discourses On the First Ten Books of Livy, produces the same exhilarating effect. Again, we witness the 8  Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (1978: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Also relevant is Skinner’s short monograph on the Florentine thinker, Machiavelli (1981: Oxford University Press, Oxford), a new edition of which was published in 2019 as part of the Oxford University Press very short introductions series, as well as his paper ‘Machiavelli on Misunderstanding Princely Virtù’ in his From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (2019: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 45–62. 9  One of the more intriguing aspects of Machiavelli’s political thought that Skinner brings to light is the central idea of paradiastole, the technique of rhetorical redescription where virtues are reframed as vices and vice versa. Skinner argues that Machiavelli would most likely have become familiar with this rhetorical technique via George of Trebizond’s translation into Latin of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric as well as the works in the Roman tradition such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and Rutilius Lupus’ De figuris, in ‘Machiavelli on Misunderstanding Princely Virtù’, 51–6.

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stunning insights that only a genuinely contextual account of Machiavelli’s much longer and more substantial work can disclose. Particularly interesting is the unique light that Skinner shines on the text’s argument that conventional Christian morality serves to undermine rather than strengthen republican virtue or virtù as well as the idea that the maintenance of political liberty requires not just active political participation but febrile dissension between rival but legitimate factions. This second idea, as we shall see shortly, is one that has become increasingly central to Skinner’s view of contemporary political thinking and practice. Another less well-known illustration of Skinner’s success in exemplifying his methodological structures is found in his essay on the trial scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.10 This example brings out more acutely than the previous one that even when Skinner’s interpretation of a particular text, or, in this case, a specific scene in a text, may not be uniquely plausible, it still can’t help being historically illuminating. In this essay Skinner questions the received wisdom of two prevailing and not unrelated views of what’s happening in the play’s trial scene: firstly, that it’s essentially a theological conflict between Judaism and Christianity, personified in the characters of Shylock and Antonio respectively; secondly, that it represents a more historically specific dichotomy between ‘the principles of equitable justice’ and ‘demand for justice embodied in common law’. He introduces another way of making sense of what’s happening in the trial scene by establishing a detailed and convincing correspondence between the highly influential principles of mainly Ciceronian judicial rhetoric and the action of the main characters, especially Shylock and Portia. It’s another remarkable display of Skinner’s method in action. More fundamentally, it provides further evidence in support of his more general and radical thesis that it’s impossible to do the history of political thought without doing and/or knowing a lot of genuine history. This introduces us to our third and final question concerning Skinner’s view of the history of ideas; Is his stridently historical version of past political thought of any relevance to our own contemporary political theories and practices? Unsurprisingly, Skinner’s answer to this question is complex and complicated. But I think we can distinguish three basic strands of an answer to his various writings without doing injustice to the sophistication 10  Quentin Skinner, ‘Judicial Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice’ in his, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 63–88.

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and nuance of his position. The first of these is his conviction that history is irrelevant to the present in the sense that it does not possess timeless and universal pearls of truth awaiting discovery. Authentic histories of political thought serve to undermine rather than vindicate the existence of such perennial truths. What Skinner’s theory and practice as a historian serves to show is that traditional or analytic history of political thought is dead, in the sense that it has lost its credibility; the fact that it may still be flourishing is no more or less fascinating than the survival of other rationally discredited social beliefs and practices. The second lesson of Skinner’s writings, intimately related to the first, is that the very idea of applying the concept of truth to the past is deeply problematic and ultimately ungrounded and ungroundable. For Skinner the past is the past in the sense that it is an objectively and irrevocably different world. The more we learn about past thinkers and their intentions and the historical context in which they operated, the more we come to recognise that theirs is fundamentally a foreign country with its own distinctively textured and complex forms of life (in the self-consciously Wittgensteinian sense of that term). What this in turn helps to show is that the concept of rationality rather than truth is far more relevant to evaluating the historical identity and validity of the ideas of long-past thinkers. So the whole approach of beginning by assessing the truth or falsity of our forebears’ beliefs as a guide to explaining them strikes Skinner as a huge mistake, since it closes off a major line of historical investigation and understanding from the very outset. For him the question is whether their beliefs were rationally defensible at the time and by their own lights. One imagines therefore that Skinner would have particularly approved of Richard Rorty’s deft handling of the Cardinal Bellarmine/Galileo debate in his groundbreaking book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where Rorty insists that there is no moment at which either side can be stigmatised for irrationality, although Bellarmine’s beliefs were no doubt false.11 We can only realistically and legitimately explain and evaluate past political ideas on the basis of their rational plausibility within the normative and linguistic conventions of their form of life. So, contextual rational acceptability rather than some metaphysically loaded and implausibly atemporal 11  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980: Blackwell, Oxford), 328–333. It is worth highlighting that the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s work figures significantly in Skinner’s and Rorty’s approach to history, especially in the way Kuhn advises that we avoid imposing our own notions of truth on past thinkers and their times.

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notion of truth becomes the appropriate criterion when assessing the validity or otherwise of past thinkers and their ideas. We now arrive at a final crucial element of Skinner’s answer regarding the topic of the past’s relevance to the present. It is one that may come as something of a surprise to the reader. For it is only in the latter part of his career that Skinner has become increasingly sympathetic to the view that the past is relevant, even profoundly important for the present. This development represents a reversal of a position he held in his earlier years when he asserted that ‘we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves.’12 That uncharacteristically glib statement was expressed at a time when he was waging a polemical war with ahistorical histories of political thought and, more fundamentally, when he was convinced that authentically historical accounts of past political thinkers revealed the glaring absence rather than the presumed presence of any substantive intellectual continuities, let alone moral lessons, between ourselves and our forebears. Back then, Skinner would have seen little or no point in the first part of the Crocean question ‘What is living and what is dead in the thought of long-­ dead canonical political philosophers?’ However, his own historical investigations have gradually informed and crystallised his sense that the historical study of former times reveals paths that were taken and ones that were overlooked or consciously avoided. Unless we are prepared to go along with some teleological or Whig view of historical development, he argues, we cannot assume that the paths we ended up taking to get us to where we are today were necessarily the right or indeed the wrong ones. But Skinner shines a light on some of the forgotten but fascinating historical roads not taken. One such road is that of Roman civic republicanism and the revival of that tradition in the late Renaissance, a tradition that was left behind in favour of the competing and eventually triumphant rights-based conception of liberty. He reminds us not merely what we gained from adopting a Hobbesian rights-based notion of liberty which gradually evolved into modern-day liberalism, but also the ‘buried intellectual treasure’ that we lost as a result of turning our back on the neo-Roman ideal of liberty with its emphasis on the

12  Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’ History and Theory, 8 (1969), 66.

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indispensability of active political participation on the part of citizens as a means of protecting their own individual liberty.13 Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Skinner’s excavation of the neo-­ Roman or ‘third’ concept of liberty in the context of Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is that we are now almost exclusively preoccupied with the extent of our negative freedom and have largely ceased to be concerned with the source and active maintenance of these freedoms. Skinner refers explicitly to Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in the closing pages of Liberty before Liberalism interpreting it as an expression of the by now ‘hegemonic’ liberal theory of individual liberty. Although Skinner erroneously describes Berlin’s essay as an exercise in the ‘purely philosophical’ and ‘purely neutral’ elucidation of the essence of liberty—Berlin’s essay is explicitly and self-consciously normatively charged and provides a historical as much as a conceptual treatment of liberty—his critique of the liberal concept of liberty is both cogent and timely.14 His excavation of the neo-Roman theory of liberty serves to shine a particularly unforgiving torch on one of the very real shortcomings of liberalism, notably, its culpable neglect of the agents and agencies responsible for safeguarding our liberties. A major weakness of the liberal preoccupation with negative liberty and its associated anxieties about the power of the state is that it obscures the large and crucial point that a vibrant and vigilant politics constitutes our most reliable way of safeguarding our liberties. Skinner’s historical work provides a sobering and significant corrective to the combination of optimism and naivety that informs so much of the hitherto reigning liberal ideology, especially its ruling distinction between the public and the private. Skinner doesn’t so much deny that absence of interference is a legitimate and necessary concern as emphasise the much greater importance of absence of subjection. The notion that our individual liberties will somehow take care of themselves is among the chief myths of liberalism. And it’s the power of that myth that helps to explain our nonchalance in effectively outsourcing the vital task of protecting our liberties to ‘our representatives’. It also reveals the allure of an ideology which has increasingly encouraged its followers to believe that a life of private consumption and political apathy is basically benign and sustainable.

13  Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, (1998: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 112. 14  Ibidem, 113, 116.

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Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism offers two general morals. The first is we get a greater sense of how difficult it can be ‘to avoid falling under the spell of our intellectual heritage’ and thereby succumbing to the trap of confusing what we regard as necessary and good with what is objectively contingent and, at the very least, morally ambivalent. But his second and more ‘imposing moral’ is that: The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one of the hegomonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader set of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitment we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of inquiry what we should think of them.15

The political upshot of Skinner’s work in this area, therefore, does not require that we naively replace contemporary liberalism with Renaissance-­ style city-state republicanism—although it’s clear that he has deep sympathies for the latter and serious misgivings about the former.16 The more general effect of reading his work is that we become more historically and indeed normatively self-conscious of the choices we have made, for better and/or for worse and the alternatives that deserve our attention.17 His ‘third concept of liberty’ prompts us to be sceptical of the received wisdom which sets up an opposition between the state and the individual and, more positively, to reimagine the relationship between the state and the  Ibidem, 116–17.  Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117, (2002), 237–68. 17  The last few lines of the final paragraph in Skinner’s book Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), capture the nuanced, yet increasingly irrepressible, spirit of his understanding of the relevance of the past to the present: 15 16

If we reflect on his [Hobbes’] counterattack, and especially on its continuing historical influence, we can hardly fail to acknowledge that he won the battle. But it is still worth asking if he won the argument. 216.

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individual in terms of a much more full-bodied ideal of the common good and, consequently, of the state as an enabler rather than an inhibitor of our freedom. If we look at the past through the lens of profit and loss, Skinner’s verdict at least with regard to liberty is that the our political well-being is far more bankrupt than we might like to believe.

Berlin’s Rapprochement Does Skinner’s critique of the genre of analytic history of philosophy land a damaging or even fatal blow on Isaiah Berlin’s conception of the history of ideas? Received wisdom would suggest that it does. For it would seem safe to assume that Berlin shares the same basic interpretative practice and philosophical assumptions about the past as other typical analytic thinkers. And if he does then surely his version of intellectual history is as vulnerable to Skinner’s withering attack as other analytic histories of political thought? It true, this would be very bad news for Berlin on more than one count. Unlike Plamenatz and most other analytic philosophers, Berlin’s engagement with history is not of a purely dispassionate or pedagogical nature. Anyone familiar with Berlin’s thought will know that his version of the history of ideas is the pursuit of philosophy by other means. When he declared his abandonment of analytic philosophy shortly after the end of World War II, he was merely waving goodbye to the analytic or, more specifically, the linguistic, way of doing philosophy, not to philosophy itself. He found a new way of pursuing the philosophical enterprise which might be called doing philosophy historically. And it was his historically-­minded way of pursuing the subject that led him towards political philosophy and, eventually, to his renowned justification of liberalism in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. But Berlin’s defence of liberal toleration is deeply invested in his understanding of history. So, if we are prepared to admit that Skinner’s demolition of the analytic approach to history is decisive, then it would appear that the implications for Berlin’s political theory are potentially devastating. Does Skinner’s radical contextualism reveal that Berlin’s historicism is more superficial than deep? The burden of the rest of this chapter is to consider the possibility that Skinner’s critique does not necessarily entail the destruction of the Berlinian edifice.18 18  For an alternative, yet equally sympathetic, account of Berlin’s philosophical or extrahistorical’ version of the history of ideas, see Michael Moran, ‘Isaiah Berlin and ‘The History

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The first thing to be said is that Berlin’s conception of the history of ideas is sui generis. His theory and practice of what he called ‘the history of ideas’ does not conform to the typical pieties of the dominant doxographical strain within analytic histories of philosophy. The first clear indication we get of Berlin’s distinctive view of the past lies in his rejection of the idea that the history of ideas is concerned with timeless questions and eternal truths. His dismissal of philosophia perennis is based mainly on the view of the past espoused by the early eighteenth-century Neapolitan thinker, Giambattista Vico. According to Berlin, Vico’s New Science shows the absurdity of the notion that there is a set of clearly defined and unvarying philosophical problems that the leading minds of every epoch since about 550 BC are somehow keeping track of and seeking to answer. For Vico, the past is very much an alien domain and must be interpreted as such. His own treatment of the Homeric age in the New Science shows the spectacular wrongheadedness of thinking that such an age was or could have been preoccupied with philosophical questions in the same way as Vico’s, or, by extension our own time. The Homeric age looked at the world so incommensurably differently from its distant descendants as to make any serious effort to compare our own specific set of problems and preoccupations with theirs a bad, unendurable joke. The chief debt we owe to Vico, Berlin argues, is not just that he alerts us to the need to be historically conscious as well as self-conscious about the historical and cultural peculiarities of former societies but that he intimates that history is a story of gains and losses rather than of straightforward progression  (or regression). Vico’s epoch may have been more sophisticated and peacable than Homer’s age but it no longer possesses the imaginative capacity to produce epic poems like the Iliad or the Odyssey. As Berlin himself says: There is something boldly original about a thinker who, in so self-satisfied a civilisation as that into which Vico was born, one which saw itself as a vast improvement on the brutality, absurdity, ignorance of earlier times, dared maintain that an unapproachably sublime poem [Homer’s] could have been produced only by a cruel, savage and, to later generations, morally repellent age. This amounts to a denial of the very possibility of a harmony of all the excellences in an ideal world. From this it follows that to judge the attainments of any one age by applying to them a single absolute criterion – that of the critics and theorists of a later period – not only is unhistorical and of Ideas’: Some Personal Impressions’ in his Metaphysical Imagination: and Other Essays on Philosophy and Modern European Mind (2018: FastPrint Publishing, Peterborough), 641–70.

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anachronistic, but rests on a fallacy, the assumption of the existence of timeless standards – the ideal values of an ideal world – when in fact some of the most admired works of men are organically bound up with a culture some aspects of which we may – perhaps cannot help but – condemn, even while claiming to understand why it is that men situated as these must have felt, thought and acted as they did. (CTH2 70–1)

While the above passage illustrates Berlin’s opposition to the assumptions underlying perennial philosophy it also touches upon his idea that it is possible to understand the past even if we might find ourselves bewildered or appalled by it, a case of tout comprendre n’est pas tout pardonner. But this immediately raises the obvious question of on what basis is Berlin claiming to understand the past: Is there not some implicit but basic assumption of perennial philosophy being smuggled into his putatively incommensurable but non-relativist historical pluralism? Is Berlin committed to the view that certain philosophical categories of thought, and even insights, manage to collapse time? The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, in the sense that Berlin does not see the past in relativistic terms but No in the sense that he is not relying on the naively anachronistic and often chauvinistic assumptions of philosophia perennis: Communities may resemble each other in many respects, but the Greeks differ from Lutheran Germans, the Chinese differ from both; what they strive after, and what they fear or worship are scarcely ever similar. This view has been called cultural or moral relativism […]. It is not relativism. Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one’s own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled. (CTH2 10–11)

But then on what basis is he distinguishing cultural and historical relativism from cultural and historical pluralism? As we have intimated in previous chapters, the solution lies in Berlin’s reworking of Immanuel Kant. Briefly restated, Berlin humanises and historicises Kant’s transcendental argument. Where Kant was more concerned with giving a philosophically defensible account of our understanding of the natural world in his

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Critique of Pure Reason, Berlin’s interest is in giving Kant’s transcendental argument an anthropological twist. What chiefly interests Berlin about Kant is not the familiar categories of thought associated with our apprehension of the external world such as time, space, number, and so on, but the mental frameworks that more directly shape our understanding of ourselves as human beings. It is these more humanistic thought patterns which provide the epistemological basis and limits of his pluralist conception of the history of ideas. As he states: there exist central features of our experience that are invariant and omnipresent, or at least much less variable than the vast variety of its empirical characteristics, and for that reason deserve to be distinguished by the name of categories. This is evident enough in the case of the external world […] Such permanent features are to be found in the moral and political and social worlds too: less stable and universal, perhaps, than in the physical one, but just as indispensable for any kind of intersubjective communication, and therefore for thought and action. An enquiry that proceeds by examples, and is therefore not scientific, but not formal, that is not deductive, either, is most likely to be philosophical. (CC2 215–6)

But what are these anthropocentric concepts and categories? What do they consist of? For Berlin this is very much a philosophical rather than a scientific or empirical question, since questions of the latter kind presuppose the very patterns of thought and their attendant concepts that require exposure and scrutiny. He also thinks that it is impossible to give anything approaching a complete and uncontroversial account of these thought patterns and ideas, since they are almost too fundamental and ubiquitous for us to be aware of them – as Wittgenstein remarked, they escape our notice ‘because they are always before our eyes’ – not to mention the fact that they are inherently vague, contested and ambiguous. However, Berlin does not let these challenges inhibit him from giving us at least some indication of the sort of things we are dealing with. Specific examples of these general categories and concepts include: such notions as society, freedom, sense of time and change, suffering, happiness, productivity, good and bad, right and wrong, choice, effort, truth, illusion (to take them wholly at random). (CC2 217)

While this list, and others that Berlin produced in his writings, are hardly exhaustive they do indicate the type of very abstract, if frequently

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primitive, ideas that Berlin considers critical to understanding ourselves as recognisable members of the human species. Moreover, the degree of interaction between our more human-centred concepts and categories and the lebenswelt is deep and extensive. These categories are also far more susceptible to spatio-temporal variation and transformation. And this explains why they are less stable than the more fixed and less contested concepts and categories centred on our understanding of physical reality. Where the latter seem to have a stronger claim to correspond to how things really are from the much-vaunted view from nowhere, the former frame the world far more from the view from here and now, though Berlin sees this difference in the persistence of certain categories and concepts of human thought as more a matter of degree. This aspect of the more human-centred thought patterns alerts us to the historical or historicised dimension of Berlin’s deployment of Kant’s transcendental argument. In effect, he ends up combining the Vichian insight that the imprint of history is everywhere and inescapable with a historicised Kantianism which seeks to reconcile itself with the idea that our patterns of self-­understanding are historically conditioned, though not without remainder. This last caveat is crucial since it gives Berlin the purchase he needs to assert that truth claims can be applied to the past, claims that go beyond rational acceptability within a particular form of life or language game. In other words, if we are willing to concede that his transcendental anthropology is plausible then he may well be able to claim that the discursive contexts of past ideas are not so historically frozen as to preclude the possibility of some level of meaningful and objective comparability and assessment of their truth value. Let me give a brief illustration of Berlin’s historical objectivism in action. I shall once again refer to his seminal essay on Machiavelli for illustrative purposes. As we noted in Chap. 2, Berlin claims that the notorious Florentine stumbled upon the truth of moral or value pluralism by dramatising the deep and ineradicable antinomy between paganism and Christianity, or, more specifically, between the civic values of ancient Rome and the private, conventional virtues of Western Christendom.19 His capacity to make and 19  Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in his Against the Current (1979: 2013 ed.: Princeton University Press, New Jersey). The nature of Berlin’s interpretation of Machiavelli raises an interesting question for Skinner and the contextual school of history: how can we explain Berlin’s success in capturing the historical meaning and significance of Machiavelli’s originality, given that he did not follow the contextual approach to Machiavelli’s thought? Skinner might respond that while there is a significant degree of overlap between

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sustain such an argument, of seeing Machiavelli as a proto-pluralist, depends on the coherence of his view that truth claims can apply to the past in a way that goes beyond what might have been considered rationally acceptable or persuasive at the time. In other words, while there is no way that, historically speaking, Machiavelli could possibly have known that he was cutting the Gordian knot of moral monism—the ruling idea of the time that there exists an objective morality that provides an authoritative and exclusively correct conception of the good—from a deeper philosophical perspective that is what he in effect ended up doing. Machiavelli is the first thinker to cause a revolution in our conceptual repertoire by subverting the dominant monistic patterns of thought and initiating their replacement by more pluralistic ways of thinking. The fundamental question we are left with is to what extent, if at all, can we justify and sustain such a transhistorical (as distinct from an ahistorical) notion of truth? Berlin considers that the history of ideas, and indeed history as a whole, would become philosophically inert without a belief in some degree of historical continuity and, more specifically, in a common humanity, whereas contextualists suggest (more often by omission than commission) his view of Machiavelli’s originality in The Prince and that of Berlin, his own interpretation is more historically anchored and therefore more objectively reliable since it gives a far more detailed account of where precisely Machiavelli was conforming to, repudiating and occasionally satirising classical humanism, especially with regard to one of its most influential and sacred texts, Cicero’s De officiis. In short, Skinner’s methodological approach to Machiavelli shows not just what the latter was saying but also what he was doing in saying what he did. Berlin might respond by arguing firstly that Skinner makes too much of this distinction between locutionary and illocutionary speech acts in terms of its applicability to the interpretation of past historical texts and, secondly, that Skinner can be guilty of over-emphasizing the discontinuities and underplaying the continuities between ourselves and the past. Another way of summarising their differences is in the form of the following questions: ‘How would we know if Berlin’s interpretation of Machiavelli holds any historical water without the likes of Skinner’s seminal historical work on the foundations of early modern political thought?’ and ‘Would the alleged metaethical significance of Machiavelli’s repudiation of classical humanism and Christian morality have occurred to us without Berlin’s philosophical conception of the history of ideas and his ideas about ethical pluralism?’ One possible answer is that what Machiavelli meant in The Prince is exactly what he said but that we would not be in a position to determine this without recognising in the first place that the two aspects— what a writer says and what s/he means—of any text are distinct. I have explored this question in detail in my previous book The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury, London), 66–78, 88–96 as well as in an extended book review of a new edition of Skinner’s Machiavelli: a very short introduction (2019: Oxford University Press, Oxford) in The Dublin Review of Books, No.114, 2019.

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that such a notion is unsound and leads to a slippery slope. In a letter dated 1991 to his editor, Henry Hardy, Berlin made the following remarks: differences between nations, cultures, different ages of human life have been exaggerated. We do not, surely, entirely misunderstand Plato, though we don’t know what Athens looked like (was it like Beirut, or like an African kraal?), even though [Quentin] Skinner would have us believe that, unless we do know such things, we don’t really understand what thinkers mean. If this is so then there is a pretty wide common ground between human beings as such, upon which we can build. It must be possible to preach to Muslim bigots, or Communist fanatics, in terms of values which they have in common with the preacher – they may reject, they may argue, they may murder and torture, but they have to construct special hypotheses in order to account for the fact that the preacher is mistaken, or explain the cause or root of the mistake, which entails some degree of common understanding. At some times, of course, the preacher is successful, at least in weakening, if not refuting, violently held views. This I firmly believe, and this applies to the whole of mankind.20

This passage has the virtue of giving a clear and faithful statement of Berlin’s position regarding the relevance of a historically and culturally ‘common ground between human beings’. Earlier in the same letter, he makes another and even more revealing comment in response to Hardy’s question as to whether there exists a ‘common human moral core’: All general propositions of the kind I utter about that kind of thing are in a sense amateur observations, general reflections not founded on accurate knowledge of history, sociology, psychology, etc. which in theory would be needed to give them any kind of objective or scientific respectability. One just says ‘Most human beings, at most times, in most places, surely…’ etc. What is this founded on? A general sense of what human beings are like, – which may well have not merely gaps but be seriously mistaken in places – but that cannot be helped: all vast generalisations of this kind are neither avoidable nor demonstrable’. (A 407)

The above contains at least two noteworthy ideas. Firstly, that our conceptions of human nature are necessarily fallible, revisable and incomplete. And secondly, the conviction that the validity of our conceptions of human 20  Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, eds. (2015: Chatto & Windus, London), 408. He also makes a similar point in CIB 25–6.

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nature and reason are not critically undermined by the fact that we cannot produce ahistorical, conclusive proofs for their alleged existence and shape. For Berlin there is a sense in which denying the truth of a common and enduring conception of humanity is not a real or appealing option. Besides, it is not one he feels we are philosophically obliged to take, since the recognition that even our most fundamental anthropological categories and concepts are not immune to historical variation is reconcilable with the idea that these same categories and concepts of thought retain a certain core, if attenuated, meaning throughout human history to make history possible. It is, of course, possible to imagine linguistic human beings who speak a language with noun phrases, verb phrases, subordinate clauses, tensed verbs etc. but who share no basic categories and concepts, no basic interests, no basic attitudes etc., with us. It is just, but only just, about possible they could be syntactic bedfellows but semantic aliens. But these possibilities hardly undermine the validity of Berlin’s position. The more decisive point rests on the question that, even if we grant that there may exist certain basic concepts of human nature that are a pre-condition of understanding the past and much else besides, is it the case that Berlin’s transcendental anthropology can provide the basis for his more ambitious metaethical claims about Machiavelli and other past thinkers?

Philosophy and / or / as History At this stage, we are in a position to bring Skinner back into our discussion. As we saw, Skinner’s main problem with conventional and blankly ahistorical history of political thought is its built-in insecure resistance to the inescapable insight of historicity. Berlin’s conception of the history of ideas avoids the obvious and fatal pitfalls of the analytic genre by rejecting the myth of perennial philosophy and much that comes with it. More importantly and positively, he embraces the truth of our historicity. But, unlike Skinner, he does not consider that the recognition of our contingency requires the abandonment of the relevance of truth, in the transhistorical sense, to historical enquiry. This is where I believe the real debate resides.21 Berlin is of the view that historicity and truth are compatible and 21  I find myself sharing Charles Taylor’s concern that a key question or puzzle that Skinner’s work raises but tends to evade is the central one of the truth value of the great texts of the past. Like Taylor, I believe that the question of the truth cannot be easily sidestepped, that,

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mutually inter-dependent whereas Skinner’s methodological purism and historical investigations commit him to thinking that historicity is only compatible with rational acceptability as an explanation of the intentions of long-past thinkers, that truth in any kind of substantively transhistorical and non-platitudinous sense is the first casualty of authentic historical self-­ consciousness. Since these are incompatible views, it would seem Berlin and Skinner can’t both be right. So, where do we go from here? Does the truth lie in Berlin’s weak and bounded historicism or the stronger, more extreme historicism or contextualism of Skinner? There are a number of tempting, if opposed, ways of responding to this question. One path, which sides with Skinner, argues that, given that our historicity or contingency goes all the way down, any kind of transhistorical notion of truth or humanity is rendered either redundant or, if permitted, will end up being the thin edge of an intolerable, anachronistic wedge. While Berlin may not be guilty of straightforward anachronism it would seem that he is far from innocent of prolepsis. The only serious claims we can make with regard to assessing the validity of past ways of life or ideologies—and Skinner’s writings suggest that ideology runs radically deep and wide—is to enquire if they are rational under their own lights, that is, that their ideas make sense and are defensible according to the normative assumptions and linguistic practices of the particular time and place. So contextualists are claiming two things here: that their approach provides the key to reconstructing the actual identity of past thinkers’ ideas and that the practical application of their methodology reveals the non-­existence of such things as trans-historical truth and reason. This suggests that any kind of substantive continuity and comparability between the ideas and values of different conceptual climates are unwarranted since they violate the limitations of our necessary contingency by valorising some outmoded and indefensible notion of trans-historical or ahistorical truth. And if the incomparability or incommensurability thesis is correct, then attempts to apply universal trans-historical truths or insights on the political thought as he says, ‘it always returns to haunt us.’ But, like Taylor too, I am prepared to admit that I may be incorrect about the non-optionality and indeed coherence of the very idea of truth applying in any conventional sense to past political thinkers. In other words, there is a distinct possibility that Skinner’s historical writings, as distinct from his strictly methodological works, contain enough evidence and argument to make us jettison the very idea of the truth value of canonical texts. See Charles Taylor, ‘The hermeneutics of conflict’ in James Tully ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (1988: Polity Press, Cambridge), 220.

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of past epochs is off limits, both epistemologically and ethically. Moreover, the lesson of genuine history cuts both ways: it emphasises the particularity of the past and magnifies the contingency of our own current situation. This is the negative sting in Skinner’s oeuvre. Moreover, unless a historian can get some substantive purchase on the context of a past thinker’s ideas, it becomes virtually impossible to assess the rationality or otherwise of that thinker’s contribution to whatever debate or tradition he or she is contributing to—hence, genuinely contextualist accounts of the past become ever increasingly thinner on the ground the further we go back in history since the detailed context is unavailable and therefore unreconstructable. Skinner’s historical method and practice spell out the radical implications of contextualism which cannot accommodate even the minimal transhistorical assumptions held by Berlin. The slogan that could be used for this particular Skinnerian approach is, there is no substitute for omniscience, since we can never know enough about the past. Another response, which is more sympathetic to Berlin’s position, admits that while our historicity is unalterable, contextualism overstates the radical incommensurability of the past. It seems plausible that we can acknowledge some of the central claims of contextualism without having to accept the thesis that the notions of truth and rationality are historically situated and hermetically sealed all the way through without remainder. This does not mean that we can go back to relying on any naïve assumptions of ahistorical truth or intellectual and moral progress, but rather that we need to reconstruct the way in which the history of ideas can balance the distinct yet frequently rival demands and insights of historicity and truth. The truth of historicity does not entail the absence of transhistorical rationality and truth. More specifically, there are levels of contextual understanding: Skinner operates at a particularly low level of the dense and detailed historical panorama, while Berlin pursues his investigations from a higher plain. This seems particularly compelling in relation to the more abstract aspects of past texts where one can make what seem like reasonable or rather not obviously absurd claims for historical continuity and philosophical comparability. The idea here is that the past is sufficiently communicable and commensurable to permit the idea of some degree of transhistorical truth and reason in relation to our understanding of it. This stance also involves the insistence that truth and rationality are inextricably intertwined and therefore cannot be separated without doing major and irreparable harm to either. Moreover, the residue is thought to be sufficient to permit us to grasp the general character and validity of past

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ideas (and further back than late-medieval or early-modern Europe which seems to be the agreed threshold for most contextualist historians). The scope of this hermeneutic conviction is likely to increase as the ideas of past thinkers become more abstract. For example, the intelligibility of Plato’s Theaetetus would seem to rely far less on the vicissitudes of historical and social context compared with his Republic or Laws. A more abstract, philosophically motivated reading of an ancient text will arrive at a point at which the acquisition of a certain amount of historical knowledge will be felt sufficient for the task in hand; there is, of course, no definitive method for determining where the relevant threshold point might be but we recognise it when the accumulation of historical background delivers increasingly diminishing returns. If this approach were to have a slogan it could do worse than choose J. L. Austin’s remark enough is enough, it does not mean everything’ where ‘enough’ in this case would refer to what is considered sufficient to make one’s point and ‘everything’ refers to literally all the information that could in practice be discovered about the historical context of a particular idea (APP3 84). Since there exist seemingly valid arguments on both sides, it would seem that we may be in the presence of a deep and intractable dilemma. Rather than plump for one side or the other, it might be more judicious to suspend judgement and keep both perspectives in view without declaring victory for one side over the other. This solution may strike some as intolerably cavalier and evasive, since it leaves us with two very different and conflicting philosophical views of history, co-existing side by side in a confrontational and seemingly irreconcilable relationship. But given that the stakes are high and in the absence of any obviously clinching argument on either side, a certain ecumenical stance would seem to be the only philosophically responsible position to adopt. And it might just prove in the end to be the most productive standpoint we take too, the one that makes all the difference, as it were. We might even discover that the best way of dealing with the genuine tension between the philosophical quest for truth and the historical recognition of contingency lies in embracing it as a fertile and liberating distinction rather than as a constricting and embarrassing dichotomy. There seems to be an undeniable sense in which philosophy is peculiarly troubled as well as blessed by the knowledge of its own past. What might this détente imply? It should not suggest the availability of some agreeable and tension-free via media. Nor should it be grounds for despair. It might mean that we are not so much left with a choice between

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philosophy and history as with a complex and ineliminable duality of legitimate but rival perspectives. If this is right, then it would seem that the last thing we should do is affirm one perspective at the cost of the other. A more judicious and honest way of responding to the matter would be to explore its source and significance. Approaching the duality in this way might reveal whether the polarity between the two outlooks is intellectually unavoidable and, if it is, how this should affect our understanding of the past as well as of our current self-understanding. Perhaps we cannot let go of the past, since we cannot help believing that it gives us reasons to feel better about ourselves (which can, of course, include the idea that we can become better only by resuscitating some element of the past to address some problem of the present). It may also be that philosophy is inextricably implicated in this story of self and societal justification. If that were so then it would seem that we couldn’t abandon history without bidding farewell to philosophy (or most of it) too. It is as hard to imagine doing philosophy without thinking about its rich heritage as it is to practice history without bringing our philosophical assumptions and preoccupations, consciously or not, to the table. In the end, it may be as mundane and profound as that we can’t have one without the other, in which case we should at least try to honour both perspectives with as much philosophical candidness and historical self-consciousness as we can muster. One feature that is common to both perspectives is a rejection of the idea that the validity of our convictions regarding either transhistorical truth or historical incomparability is highly unlikely to be resolved by a priori reasoning. That may seem like a meagre enough take-away but it’s not necessarily an unimportant or uninstructive one. It might even form the germ of an idea that could redefine what we take or imagine philosophy and history to be, one that Berlin touches on in his view about what makes a history deep and great and his insistence that it is not: mere reconstruction of the past in an archaeological sense is not enough. Nor will the categories of the natural sciences alone do the job. This plainly is connected with the differences between what is usually called knowledge, and Dilthey’s concept of Verstehen – understanding. I am inclined to argue that what we mean by knowledge is identical in both the natural and the human sciences, whereas there exists a cognitive function  – namely, ­understanding  – which is involved only when we are speaking of agents, their motives, their purposes, fears, hopes, feelings, ideas, acts: not only those of individual human beings, but those of groups or classes or

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movements or institutions or entire societies. Discussion of the lives and outlooks and activities of such agents involves categories and concepts which cannot be applied to the subject matter of the natural sciences without anthropomorphism; while treatment of topics which lie on the borderline between the two kinks of science, or in the no-man’s-land between them (certain kinds of applied economics, or social psychology, for instance) create problems of their own. To seek to understand the moral codes, the social purposes, the cultural or spiritual trends and tendencies of a given society is to seek to understand what it must have been like to have lived in a certain milieu. Capacity of this kind of insight requires the possession of something akin to an artistic gift, which alone can integrate and give life to the dry bones of research, the accumulation of relevant facts which, of course, can be obtained only by empirical investigation […]. I cannot help thinking that the most useful task – indeed, the main one – for philosophers of history is the analysis of the logic of historical explanation. This means the analysis of the use of such words as ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘in due course’, ‘it was not surprising that’, and so on, which are the connecting links between various propositions about the past, and bind them into logical structures (so it seems to me) in a fashion different from that in which such logical cement is used in the natural sciences. (CC2 324–5)22

A Phoney War or a Genuine Conflict? In recent years, Skinner has shown an increasing preparedness to temper the more uncompromising—or what some of his detractors have labelled fundamentalist—aspects of his contextualism in the direction of admitting that truth is not an entirely invalid or redundant notion with regard to the work of the historian of ideas. The following recent statement, for example, sounds virtually indistinguishable from something that Berlin might say: Not only am I not a conceptual relativist, but I believe that the truth of conceptual relativism would be incompatible with the practice of cultural history. Unless there is some considerable overlap between what we believe to be true and what our forebears likewise believed to be true, and unless we additionally share with them some assumptions about how best to fit

22  Isaiah Berlin, ‘Is a Philosophy of History Possible?’ in Yirmiahu Yovel ed., Philosophy of History and Action (1978: Dordrecht), reprinted in CC2 318–25.

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together our beliefs in order to construct arguments, then we shall have no means of gaining access to their world at all.23

Remarks like this raise the question of whether the differences between Berlin and Skinner have been exaggerated. They also prompt the broader suspicion that traditional analytic history of philosophy may not have been as degenerate as the contextualists asserted. Should the response of the contextualists to the analytic view of history be judged as an overreaction, fuelled more by extreme and myopic polemics than by a sober and balanced assessment of the matter? I wish to adumbrate two different ways of treating this question. The first begins by arguing that a sense of intellectual openness and detachment was an early casualty of the heated polemics between contextualists and traditionalists; traditionalists tended to dismiss their adversaries as historical fundamentalists invading their philosophical territory, whereas contextualists condemned their adversaries as methodologically empty, historically uninteresting and philosophically desperate. Put slightly differently, the traditionalists felt the historicists were purging history of philosophy while the historicists claimed that the traditionalists were murdering history by denying its otherness. Neither of these sets of complaints was entirely unfounded about much of the output that was produced by either side, especially its more mediocre and doctrinaire representatives. Contextualists were taking a principled stand against the wildly ahistorical and condescending ‘histories’ of philosophy while analytic philosophers were defending what they regarded as the enduringly relevant ‘great books’ approach to their subject. According to Derek Parfit, the history of philosophy is studied by two kinds of thinkers: the archaeologist and the grave-robber. It was a battle that perhaps needed to happen. It sufficiently embarrassed analytic philosophers to make them think twice before producing second-hand, meaningless histories of Western political thought untethered to anything that could be even vaguely conceived of as genuine history, while it prompted contextual historians of ideas to puzzle over the relatively high degree of overlap between their own findings and the insights of less historically-minded yet acute analytic philosophers, or indeed the capacity of the latter to produce intellectually original and rich treatments of past thinkers. Now that the dust of battle has settled, we 23  Quentin Skinner in Truth in Science, the Humanities and Religion: Balzan Symposium 2008, M. E. H.. Nicolette Mout and Wener Stauffacher eds. (2010: Springer, Dordrecht), 95.

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seem to be left with a new set of questions and possibilities. Should we, for instance, encourage a more symbiotic relationship between history and philosophy that seeks to combine the insights of contextualism and the preoccupations of present-day philosophy? Or would it be a better and more feasible idea to try to rise above both genres and perhaps even replace them with a new way of defining our relationship with the past? Perhaps a self-consciously reflective form of history could provide a bridge that would connect analytic and non-analytic genres of philosophy. The conspicuous lack of engagement between analytic and other forms of philosophy is regrettable and unnecessary. But a greater appreciation of philosophy’s reliance on history on the part of analytic philosophers is likely to generate an interest in the work of, for example, continental philosophers who have shown a far greater inclination to appreciate history’s indispensability to the philosophical enterprise. These are just a few of the potentially fruitful paths that are worth consideration.24 However, there is a less conciliatory way of regarding the debate between analytic philosophy and contextual history. It may also be a more honest view of the situation. It argues that what the disagreement between analytic historians of philosophy and their contextualist opponents shows is that the history of ideas is primarily, ideally exclusively, a concern of historians and that philosophers should stick to their own peculiarly contemporary knitting and cease their unblushingly ahistorical (mis)appropriations of long-dead thinkers. What genuinely historical accounts of past thinkers show is that past ideas form part of a radically foreign country with little or nothing in common with our particular priorities and concerns.25 According to this more radically historicist, virtually nihilist, line of thought, Berlin’s claim that there exists some nucleus of transcendental anthropological categories and concepts which have somehow survived 24  The philosopher James Conant, no doubt following Cora Diamond, has put forward and practiced a way of making sense of long-dead philosophers (as well as relatively contemporary ones) which he has called ‘resolute readings’. He discusses how his own ‘resolute readings’ of philosophers differ from those carried out by both traditionalists and historicists in an episode of my Talking to Thinkers series which is published on YouTube. One of the more fascinating claims that Conant makes is that the traditionalists and historicists share a number of fundamental assumptions that they fail to see and would hate to admit. 25  As Skinner states in his paper, ‘Interpretation, rationality and truth’: ‘To look for complete intelligibility is to adopt an unduly optimistic view of what we can hope to bring back from the foreign lands of the past.’ See his Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, Volume 1 (2002: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 56.

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through the past and enable grand, trans-epochal philosophical claims is based more on wish fulfilment than anything else. Not only does Berlin fail to produce anything close to a sufficiently robust and detailed account of his transcendental anthropology to justify the more outlandish epistemological and historical claims, but the wide-ranging and detailed historical research of Skinner and his followers would strongly suggest, if not demonstrate, the outright absence and, therefore, irrelevance of such entities as transhistorical truth and rationality. Indeed an unerring conclusion that one draws from contextual histories is that the only type of rationality we can legitimately deploy in assessing the validity of the ideas of past thinkers is to enquire if they are rationally sanctioned (or conceivably intelligible) by the discursive practices and ideological conventions of their own specific time. To assume or demand anything more is idle. As Skinner says, ‘history is all there is’ and it gives us no reason for thinking that various and different conceptual patterns of thought are not contingent all the way through.26

Incommensurable Forms of Life Versus One Pluralist World We are now drawing close to the heart of the issue. Let us begin by introducing something Wittgenstein says in On Certainty, to help determine if the insights of contextualism really do expose a fatal problem with Berlin’s more ambitious pluralist claims about the past: 6.08. Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn’t precisely this what we call a ‘good ground’? 6.09. Suppose we met people who did not regard that (i.e. the propositions of physics) as a telling reason. Now, how do we manage this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive)., Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? – If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language game as a base from which to combat theirs? 6.10. And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.

26  Quentin Skinner, ‘The Third Concept of Liberty’, The Inaugural Isaiah Berlin Lecture, British Academy (2001).

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6.11. Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. 6.12. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man – but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives).27

There are a couple of points raised by Wittgenstein that are pertinent to our discussion. One is a deep scepticism about the extent to which one form of life can be objectively held to be rationally inferior or superior to another. Indeed the question ceases to have any substantial relevance. Another is that persuasion rather than reason is more likely to come into play where historical or cultural incommensurability arises—and Wittgenstein’s remarks suggest that persuasion will have little to do with reason and far more to do with ideology and brute power. A final point is the implicit one that truth doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the situation; the implication being that truth is a function of what it is rational to believe within a form of life. While Wittgenstein’s observations would appear to favour Skinner over Berlin, that conclusion is not inevitable. What is left unproven by Wittgenstein and, to a lesser degree, Skinner, is that forms of life must behave like self-contained and impenetrable bubbles. It may be true that our understanding of reason, truth and humanity is exclusive to our language game, yet even if that is the case it would surely be a contingent rather than a necessary truth. But if we can leave that question to one side for the moment, it would seem we have every reason to be sceptical that our notions of truth and rationality could have some deep meaning or purchase beyond our specific form of life; there is no obviously cogent reason to expect that they should and every reason to expect that the contingencies specific to various forms of life are so unique as to virtually guarantee only the slimmest, if any, of continuities or rational bridgeheads between them; Skinner’s denial that he is a relativist seems to be based on the idea that while previous forms of life are incommensurably different they are not entirely impenetrable or self-sealing. This allows Skinner to posit a minimal but effectively platitudinous notion of transhistorical rationality that grants him the bedrock he needs to ‘gain access’ into different forms of life. His scepticism about trans-historical notions of 27  Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G.E.M.  Anscombe and G.  H. von Wright eds., (1974: Basil Blackwell, Oxford).

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rationality also informs his belief that a consideration of the truth of past beliefs is redundant.28 But what if our world or rather worlds are not as Wittgenstein and Skinner assume? What if there is one all-inclusive human horizon to which all of humanity and its history belongs? And what if this horizon forms the basis and boundary within which there exists a plurality of forms of life and perspectives? Granting this possibility suggests that what we may be confronted with is not a series of self-standing and radically autonomous forms of life but a bounded plurality of distinct and perhaps conflicting worldviews (Fig.  5.1). The following illustration attempts to capture the nature and differences between the separate perspectives of epistemological and historical relativism, Skinner and Berlin: There are a number of noteworthy features of Berlin’s viewpoint: in the first place, it views all former and contemporary societies and cultures as well as religious, scientific and humanistic conceptions of the world as falling within what he called ‘the human horizon’. This meant for Berlin that there must be a minimum core (highlighted in the black circle) of shared assumptions and ideas, both naturalistic and humanistic, that are necessary for us to see others as intelligibly human; secondly, Berlin’s transcendental, if rather primitive, core and correspondingly bounded pluralism are not required to meet the impossible task required of the relativist perspective since it does accept that there exists a radical autonomy of different forms of life. This isn’t to claim, of course, that Berlin’s transcendental anthropology is necessarily correct, but it is to assert that it is far from incoherent and is far from a mere platitude. His position may be frustratingly vague and inchoate—it’s as if he is giving us the merest outline of dots that need to be joined and then the shape filled in—but this should

1. Relativist View

2. Skinner’s View

3. Berlin’s View

Fig. 5.1  Absolute relativism, qualified relativism and bounded pluralism 28  See especially his paper ‘Interpretation, rationality and truth’ in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol.I, Regarding Method (2002: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 27–56.

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not blind us to its possible plausibility.29 It offers a way of making sense of history and humanity that avoids the challenges of radical incommensurability presented by Wittgenstein and Skinner and prompts us to consider the prospect of understanding the past and, therefore, the present in new and potentially more illuminating ways on the ground that there may exist what Martin Hollis has aptly called, ‘the epistemological unity of mankind’.30 The core challenge moves from working out how, if at all, different conceptual schemes and forms of life could possibly communicate to the no less difficult one of identifying the coherence and supporting evidence for thinking that the ‘we’ of humanity that survive through time and contain certain fundamental categories and concepts of thought that accommodate a plurality of perspectives but within the confines of a shared and not insubstantial meaning.31 This links back to something that was discussed in the second chapter. There I proposed that a scalar concept of truth allows us to make more sense of the reality of our ethical experience, especially the phenomenon of ethical conflict. Berlin’s transcendental argument provides the background to his pluralistic understanding of truth, inviting us to entertain the idea that there is a plurality of substantial and different ways of conceiving of how the concepts of truth and knowledge relate to distinct forms of human enquiry. His perspective lets us see how the concept of truth and rationality can apply in very different, if overlapping, ways to the humanities as well as the sciences. Berlin’s quasi-Kantian point is that all forms of truth, reason and knowledge are the product of human thought (or subjectivity) even though some forms, namely the sciences, are more accountable to the external, physical world than they are to the internal, human world. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the questions we ask 29  There are aspects of Berlin’s pluralist outlook that share interesting parallels with the work of Martin Hollis in this area, especially the latter’s paper ‘The epistemological unity of mankind’ in S.  C. Brown, Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences (1979: Humanities Press. New Jersey) and touch also on a number of philosophical issues discussed in Jonathan Lear’s thought-provoking paper ‘Transcendental Anthropology’ in Philip Pettit and John McDowell eds. Subject, Thought and Context (1986: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 267–98. Lear’s paper argues that the idea of transcendental anthropology is not oxymoronic but tenable and important. 30  Ibidem., 267. 31  My treatment and illustration of Berlin’s position is similar to and overlaps with aspects of Henry Hardy’s account of Berlin’s moral core and human horizon which I have found highly instructive. See Henry Hardy’s Appendix in The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin, George Crowder and Henry Hardy eds. (2007: Prometheus, New York), 293–7 and his In Search of Isaiah Berlin (2018: I. B. Tauris, New York), 229.

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and the methods we use to address them in such subjects as philosophy, literature, psychology, history, anthropology and the performative arts are vastly different to those raised and answered  in physics, biology, logic, mathematics, chemistry and so on. He did not share Kant’s belief that the underlying categories and concepts of thought are derived from a process of intuitive deduction. He accepted Kant’s transcendental argument to the extent that he believed there are certain basic categories of thought—for instance, the physical categories of three dimensional space as well as the humanistic categories of freedom as an unforced choice—focused on the natural world as well as the human world without which human  self-­ understanding and knowledge would be impossible. However, he departed from Kant and remained faithful to Hume in his insistence that our awareness of such fundamental categories of thought and the various and often irreconcilable mental frameworks that are based on them are derived from the inductive methods and insights of concrete, a posteriori enquiry.32 He was adamant that our concepts and categories in both the sciences and the humanities are contingent and malleable even if some are more common and fixed than others. He did not, therefore, fully go along with Kant’s well-known claim that a ‘transcendental idealist’ could describe himself as an ‘empirical realist’ since he was not prepared to endorse Kant’s a priori intuitionism.33 He remained deeply and consistently Humean in his conviction that, apart from the formal sciences of logic and mathematics, all forms of genuine knowledge are empirical (in the broadest sense), contingent and susceptible to change. But, unlike Hume, he did not think that the sciences exhaust the realm of objective human knowledge. Paraphrasing Kant, Berlin believed that transcendental idealism without empiricism and 32  See, in particular, his less well-known ‘Induction and Hypothesis’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supplementary vol. (16) 1937, 63–102. Available in the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. 33  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (1929: MacMillan, London). Kant believed that his transcendental idealist could see himself as an empirical realist since:

he may admit the existence of matter without going outside his mere self-consciousness, or assuming anything more than the certainty of his own representations, that is, the cogito ergo sum. For he considers this matter and even its inner possibility to ne appearance merely; and appearance, if separated from our sensibility, is nothing. A370s

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history is empty, but purely scientific empiricism without transcendentalism is blind. There is, lastly, a distinct possibility that Skinner’s increasingly concessive statements regarding the pre-conditions of historical understanding— which go beyond mere platitudes—and his increasing affirmation of the relevance of the past to the present have more in common with Berlin’s notion of a ‘human horizon’ than have been acknowledged (Fig. 5.2). I now believe that the following illustration, in which various past forms of life all share, to varying degrees, some minimal core of common humanity (highlighted in the black circle) would be a more faithful picture of Skinner’s perspective: So perhaps a more judicious response is ‘The jury is still out but open to hearing more evidence.’ But whatever position we think is most plausible, a question that ought to be seriously reckoned with is: What is the purpose of such historico-philosophical inquiries? This may sound like an impertinently obtuse, even philistine, poser. None the less, if we are willing to disregard such excessively precious sensitivities for a moment, we stand a better chance of making some headway. The argument from the intrinsic value of an intellectual enquiry may be noble but it is, typically, rather presumptuous and unilluminating, especially for non-members of the choir. Things get more interesting when we move to a consideration of the more practical benefits of such historical scholarship. In this vein, one possible outcome of intellectual history is that it alerts us to a sense of historical discontinuity and contingency, to a recognition that the ideas which are of vital concern to us today are not the same as those that preoccupied our ancestors. This in turn can encourage a healthy scepticism about the presumed rationality or rightness of our own beliefs and preferences as well as an awareness that there may be better ideas and possibilities open to us than our relatively narrow and present-minded world view accommodates or even acknowledges. There is also the very distinct possibility that a sense of the genuine pastness of the past reveals its complete Fig. 5.2  Limited relativism

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and incommensurable otherness. But is this so very different from a justification of an analytic history of philosophy which claims that only a truly philosophical, if historically fitful, treatment of the great canon of Western speculation is capable of deciphering themes of abiding interest and revealing their relevance to contemporary themes? Are we back where we started? Not necessarily. If my discussion has some merit it suggests that we can’t return in good faith to the status quo ante. That is not insignificant progress in itself. And if we are prepared to indulge the spirit of inter-­ disciplinary open-mindedness, then the real dividend may lie in pursuing the unexplored possibilities that open up once we move beyond the polemics of contextualism contra doxography. For a vital insight of genuine history is surely an acute awareness of the genealogy and contingency of our thoughts and experiences And this in turn helps show why being aware of the deep and inescapable vicissitudes of history is integral to the task of philosophy and to our self-understanding as a species. The final pages of Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism end up making much the same claim. As we observed earlier, Skinner argues that there are two morals to be drawn from his excavation of the neo-Roman view of liberty. The first is that it surfaces the challenge of being blindsided by the spell of our intellectual inheritance and, more specifically, of the hegemony of the liberal theory and practice of negative freedom. The second, more ‘imposing’ moral is essentially the other side of the same coin, namely, that history can empower us to become less bewitched by our intellectual and moral inheritance by making us aware of forgotten or suppressed ways of thinking that may still be of relevance to how we can make sense of our contemporary state of affairs. It is however difficult to see how Skinner can sustain this moral without claiming continuities that his own methodology commits him to denying. It also appears somewhat puzzling that Skinner did not draw another, more bold lesson from his genealogical work in this area. A third point is surely that a major shortcoming of the liberal theory of negative liberty is its preoccupation with the scope of our negative freedoms and its regrettable, even culpable, neglect of the source of those liberties and what’s required of us to safeguard them. This third, unstated moral flows directly from Skinner’s reconstruction of the pre-liberal notion of liberty and its relevance seems greater now than ever. Our obsession with preserving and expanding the cordon sanitaire of negative liberty has left us hugely vulnerable to the twin dangers of political apathy and ‘democratic’ demagoguery, something that Benjamin Constant presciently warned us about in the early

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decades of the nineteenth century.34 Skinner reminds us of the very real and present dangers associated with our almost exclusive preoccupation with the private sphere of our family and friends and our accompanying obliviousness of the demands of civic duty and political involvement. Moreover, the broader historical irony that ‘the development of the Western democracies should have been accompanied by the atrophying of the ideal that government of the people should be conducted by the people’ has never been lost on Skinner.35 In summary, the questions that historians ask about the past do not exhaust the meaningful and urgent questions that can be asked about the past, especially in relation to how we make sense of ourselves and our situation. History and philosophy are too wide-ranging and promiscuous, too inescapably intertwined and, above all, too important to let the past be the exclusive preserve of historians or, for that matter, philosophy be the sole business of present-minded philosophers. Philosophy and history, alongside such subjects as psychology, anthropology, literature, the arts and the sciences, constitute indispensable elements of our knowledge of the world and our understanding of ourselves and others. The relationship between philosophy and its past may be inherently contested and unstable but it is not one from which either party would necessarily benefit from a divorce. Philosophy is a deeply tradition-bound form of enquiry and the pull of its history both confirms and challenges its complicated sense of identity and purpose. One of the overlooked achievements, to which Berlin and Skinner have contributed in this wider context, is that ideas and their lineage are no longer regarded as mere epiphenomena but as central elements of a proper understanding of humanity. And a crucial part of this achievement is an appreciation of history’s power to continually shape and enrich the nature and aims of the philosophical enterprise. They both exemplify, in their own distinctive and often competing  ways, how historical enquiry can produce philosophical lessons even if it’s not easy (or even possible) to disentangle the history from the philosophy. In addition, they offer a liberating antidote to the depressing presentism and insubstantiality of our 34  Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’, Biancamaria Fontana trans. Constant: Political Writings (1988: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 326. For a characteristically informed, if brief, comparative discussion of Berlin and Constant on liberty, see Alan Ryan, ‘Isaiah Berlin: Contested Conceptions of Liberty and Liberalism’ in Joshua L.  Chernis and Steven B.  Smith The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 225–28. 35   Quentin Skinner, ‘The Missing History  – A Symposium’ in the Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 1989, 690.

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reactionary age and its fixation with crudely binary, infantilising and, ultimately, barren modes of thinking. As Skinner says, ‘the pen is a mighty sword’ in its capacity to interpret our situation and to reveal the freedom that’s available to change it.36 Berlin’s pen expresses this freedom in the following passage which displays his inimitable knack of transmuting the ideas of long-dead thinkers into something unparochially but credibly continuous with our own contemporary and contingently formed  lives and thoughts: He [Vico] was, that is, the first modern thinker to grasp the fundamental difference between scientific and historical analysis—the X-ray and the portrait—between the method which consists in perceiving and abstracting what is identical or similar in a large number of different cases, in order to establish some law or model from which new knowledge can be obtained by applying it to the unknown future or past: and, as distinct from this, the method of whose task is to uncover not the common kernel of dissimilar cases, but, on the contrary, the individual character of each—that which makes each action or event or person, or society or school of art or work of literature, what it is, uniquely; and does so by placing the human beings with whom it deals in their own specific time and environment, their own moral, intellectual, historical and social ‘context’, by means, and by reference to the standards, more refined than, but not necessarily different in principle from, those used in the normal processes of life by men in their intercourse with one another. (TCE2 138)

36  Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction: Seeing things their way’, Visions of Politics Vol. 1., Regarding Method (2002: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 7.

CHAPTER 6

Berlin and Bernard Williams on Liberalism

Opera before Country! Isaiah Berlin Letter to David Webster—8 October, 1959

The exact timing and circumstances of Bernard Williams’ conversion to the centrality of history to philosophy are not as straightforward to determine as they are for Berlin. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem too fanciful to suppose that it occurred in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly during the period when he wrote the Introduction to Berlin’s Concepts and Categories: incidentally, it is in the Preface to that book that Berlin himself elucidated his own reasons for abandoning. The Oxford style of analytic  philosophy  for the  history of ideas.1 Towards the end of his introduction to 1  One would not want to push this speculative claim too hard. It could be argued, quite plausibly, that anticipations of Williams’ historicist turn are detectable earlier, especially in the spirit of his short book on morality that appeared in 1972, and even in some of his earlier papers published in the Problems of the Self (1973: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). But there is no doubt that his recognition of the centrality of history to philosophy became increasingly explicit and pronounced from the mid to late 1970s. Scholars have tended to attribute Williams’ historical turn to the influence of Nietzsche and Collingwood, and rarely, if ever, recognise the likely significant influence of his colleague and friend Isaiah Berlin, not to mention the impact of historically-minded political theorists such as Quentin Skinner and John Dunn—both of whom were based in Cambridge when Williams moved there in the late 1960s—who had been highlighting the historical absurdities of analytic philosophy for some time. In a way, Williams was a rather late arrival at the historicist party.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6_6

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Concepts and Categories, Williams makes a series of characteristically acute remarks about Berlin’s pluralist defence of liberalism. What makes his observations particularly insightful is the perception that history and historical self-consciousness not only provide the key to making sense of Berlin’s political theory but constitute, more generally, a large and crucial element of his understanding of the philosophical enterprise itself. The relevant section of Williams’ characterisation of Berlin’s historically-­ informed philosophical justification of a liberal, tolerant society merits extensive quotation: What truth is it that is known to someone who recognises the ultimate plurality of values? In philosophical abstraction, it will be that there are such values, and, put in that blank way, it can be taken to speak for an objective order of values which some forms of consciousness (notably the liberal form) are better than others at recognising. But that way of putting it is very blank indeed. It is more characteristic of Berlin’s outlook, and more illuminating in itself, to say that one who properly recognises the plurality of values is one who understands the deep and creative role that these various values can play in human life. In that perspective, the correctness of the liberal consciousness is better expressed, not so much in terms of truth – that it recognises the values which indeed there are – but in terms of truthfulness. It is prepared to try to build a life round the recognition that these different values do each have a real and intelligible human significance, and are not just errors, misdirections or poor expressions of human nature. To try to build life in any other way would now be an evasion, of something which by now we understand to be true. What we understand is a truth It must also be said, of course, that Berlin held Williams in the highest of esteem not only as a friend but as a philosopher. After being told by Williams that he had dedicated his second collection of philosophical papers, Moral Luck, to Isaiah and his wife, Aline, Berlin took the opportunity to acknowledge how highly he regarded Williams as a philosopher: ‘I do not believe there is another philosopher living with whom I feel in deeper sympathy even when (as in the case of ‘no ought no can’) I disagree.’ Unpublished letter from Isaiah Berlin to Bernard Williams, 22 November 1981, Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library at Wolfson College, Oxford, by permission of the Trustees. Williams, for his part, admired Berlin as a friend and a philosopher, though perhaps more for the former than the latter. Williams acknowledged Berlin’s ‘permanent contribution’ to ‘a sound and human conception of social thought’ in his paper ‘Conflicts of Values’ in Alan Ryan ed. The Idea of Freedom: essays in honour of Isaiah Berlin (1979: Oxford University Press, Oxford) republished in Moral Luck (1981). He also paid a moving tribute to Berlin, the man and the philosopher, in ‘The Reluctant Philosopher’, delivered in Oxford on 21 March 1998, which was published afterwards in the Times Literary Supplement, (29 May,1998), and reprinted in Henry Hardy, ed., The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009: The Boydell Press, Woodbridge).

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about human nature as it has been revealed – revealed in the only way in which it could be revealed, historically. The truthfulness that is required is a truthfulness to that historical experience of human nature. We can see, then, that in Berlin’s central conception of values and, connectedly, of humanity, there is an implicit appeal, once more, to historical understanding. We can perhaps see, too, how the development of his thought from general theory of knowledge to the history of ideas and the philosophy of history was not merely a change of interest; and that his complex sense of history is as deeply involved in his philosophy, even in its more abstract applications, as it is, very evidently, in his other writings, and in his life. (CC2 xxxviii–ix)

Few, if any, have written with greater fidelity and perceptiveness  about Isaiah Berlin’s thought than Bernard Williams. In a little over three hundred words he manages to uncover the heart of his friend’s philosophical outlook and of the political upshot of Berlin’s epistemological and historical perspective. In short, he testifies to the essential oneness or integrity of Berlin’s thought. Williams also ends up providing an uncannily accurate preview of how his own philosophical ideas would develop and crystallise over subsequent years. Indeed, it would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that the germ of much that he wrote during the remainder of his life is evident in the above passage. The importance of historical self-­ awareness and of the kind of truth and truthfulness it can yield about our private and public lives became more evident in his work; from the appearance of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) through to Shame and Necessity (1993), Making Sense of Humanity (1995), and culminating in his late masterpiece Truth and Truthfulness (2002).2 The three volumes of his posthumous philosophical papers bear witness to the trajectory of his philosophical and historical turn: Williams proceeds to demolish much of the analytic temple before he begins the more constructive task of furnishing a credible defence of liberalism from the ruins. The purpose of what follows is to examine the reasons why both Berlin and Williams felt that history is indispensable to a philosophical understanding of politics, especially philosophy interpreted as a humanistic subject. More specifically, I shall be concerned with exploring the foundation 2  See, in particular, the Postscript to Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985: Fontana Press, London), chapters 5 and 6 of Shame and Necessity (1993: University of California Press, Berkeley), ‘Saint-Just’s Illusion’ in Making Sense of Humanity: and other philosophical papers 1983–92 (1995: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), and the entirety of Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2002: Princeton University Press, New Jersey).

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of their shared conviction that history plays a constitutive role in providing a reflectively credible and normatively cogent defence of liberalism: this task will involve looking at how Williams develops and deepens Berlin’s distinctive justification of an open, tolerant and pluralist society. It will also explore the differences and tensions between Berlin and Williams, particularly in relation to their contrasting views about the basis of the distinction between science and ethics as well as the problem of free will. I shall then consider how their realistic yet affirmative views of liberalism transform our understanding of the defensibility and value of that political outlook and, more broadly, of the nature and point  of political philosophy as a whole. But before we discuss these themes, we need to establish why Williams himself thinks that history is or ought to be central to philosophy in the first place.

Williams’ Historicist Turn As we saw in the last chapter, analytic philosophy has not been on especially good terms with the past. Since its inception at the start of the last century it has shown a propensity to pursue its philosophical preoccupations without giving history more than a passing and usually condescending glance. Its attitude to the past is often indistinguishable from that of science to its past; it is felt that nothing of contemporary philosophical interest is to be gained from reading the writings of past philosophers just as it is thought that scientists have nothing of substance to learn from their distant precursors. At their heart, philosophy and science live in the perpetual present and have little or nothing to benefit from looking in the rear-view mirror. Philosophers are, no doubt, welcome to investigate what their forbears might have thought so long as they don’t expect the fruit of their studies to be regarded as anything more than a philosophically irrelevant sideshow. All the real action lies in addressing steadfastly contemporary philosophical problems, and that’s where you will find all genuine and serious-minded philosophers focusing their attention. The present doesn’t just define the realm of worthwhile philosophical enquiry, it exhausts it. Such a blankly ahistorical view of philosophy’s self-image proved uncongenial to both Berlin and Williams. For Berlin the epiphany came towards the end of the Second World War. Following a conversation he had with the Harvard logician, H.  M. Sheffer, Berlin records that  he ‘gradually came to the conclusion that I should prefer a field in which one could hope to know more at the end of one’s life than when one had begun; so I left philosophy for the field of the history of ideas, which had

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for many years been of absorbing interest to me (CC2 xxvii). What became increasingly clear from that insightful moment is that Berlin’s move to the history of ideas turned out to be the pursuit of philosophy by other means. In Williams’ case, the exact circumstances and timing of his Pauline conversion to the idea that history is necessary to philosophy remain uncertain, the first real inkling of his historicist turn showed itself in his monograph on Descartes, published in 1978, the same year as he wrote his Introduction to Berlin’s Concepts and Categories.3 In the Preface to his book on Descartes, he highlights a basic distinction between what he calls ‘the history of ideas’ and ‘the history of philosophy’, adumbrating the difference between the two in the following terms: […] the history of ideas is history before it is philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way round.

After making the rather obvious point that ‘in any worthwhile work of either sort, both concerns are likely to be represented’ he goes on to affirm: For the history of ideas, the question about a work ‘what does it mean? is centrally the question of what did it mean? (italics are Williams’), […] The history of philosophy of course has to constitute its object, the work, in genuinely historical terms, yet there is a cut-off point, where authenticity is replaced as the objective by the aim of articulating philosophical ideas. […] The present study … prefers the direction of rational reconstruction of Descartes’s thought, where the rationality of the construction is essentially and undisguisedly conceived in the contemporary style. […] I hope that the concerns represented in this way were concerns of Descartes, and that to speak of his having had a special kind of project that I have tried to articulate in this book relates illuminatingly to something historically and importantly true about his outlook.4  Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978: Penguin, London), 9–11.  Ibidem, 10. There is a particular criticism that one might raise in relation to Williams’ Preface to his book on Descartes, where he compares the inevitability of anachronism in historically-centred histories of ideas with ‘playing seventeenth-century scores on seventeenth-century instruments according to seventeenth-century practice […] does not produce seventeenth-century music, since we have necessarily twentieth-century ears.’ This is a misunderstanding of what historically-minded interpreters like Skinner and Dunn (whose work he mentions in a footnote) are setting out to do. Surely, they are not trying to reconstitute past actions or experiences, which would indeed be absurd, but seeking to reproduce what a past thinker or in this case, a composer, intended the composition to sound. 3 4

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This rather conventional analytic view of the difference between the history of ideas and the history of philosophy had morphed into something much more  developed and interesting by 1994 when Williams revisited the topic. His paper ‘Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy’ made clear that he had reached a mature and relatively radical position: he realised that it wasn’t so much that his earlier standpoint was fundamentally wrong but that it wasn’t sufficiently right  or radical.5 There are a number of striking claims which Williams makes in this later paper. The first is that a seamless fusion of the history of ideas and the history of philosophy is judged unfeasible for two reasons: firstly, good histories of ideas are most likely to reveal that the ideas of past thinkers did not actually mean what subsequent thinkers have made of them. Secondly, the two different ways of approaching long-dead philosophers require very different types of sensibility which are unlikely to be found in the same scholar.6 It is most probable that Berlin would have concurred with each of these points. As we noted in the previous chapter, though he respected the work of the Cambridge school of contextual history, he believed that their approach did not exhaust the legitimate terrain of more philosophically motivated history, that there is a place for the kind of philosophical history of ideas that he practiced. This is the type of philosophical history that Williams describes as philosophy first, which differentiates itself from the 5  Williams’ initial distinction is captured more concisely and caustically by Derek Parfit who said that philosophers who study the history of philosophy divide into one of two camps: archaeologists and grave robbers! 6  In a review of The Sense of the Past, Jonathan Barnes argues that Williams’ claim about the incompatibility of the history of ideas and the history of philosophy is unpersuasive and, in any case, untrue. But it is hard to see how it would be possible to write a genuine history of ideas that is also a history of philosophy of the type that Williams highlights. Leaving aside the fact that such a history would be impossibly long, it is unclear who would or could write such an improbable book. The unwisdom of Barnes’ criticism is comparable to a the unwisdom of a question that Ray Monk reports he was once asked by an notable philosopher on the subject of biography. The interlocutor asked him what was wrong with the idea of a definitive biography that literally told all the facts of a person’s life in a determinately nonselective way. Monk responded plausibly enough by saying that such a fact-filled book would no longer be a biography but something entirely different, adding that a successful biography brings the biographer’s necessarily selective point of view of his or her subject’s life to bear. The same is surely true of historically-centred histories of ideas and philosophically-minded histories of philosophy: the sensibility that motivates one genre is not just different from that which informs the other but is incommensurable too. See Jonathan Barnes’ review in the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 104, No.10 (October 2007), 540–5 and Ray Monk on ‘Philosophy and Biography’, in his PhilosophyBites Podcast.

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idea of those for whom the history of philosophy is history first. Regarding the discrepancy between what past philosophers may have meant and what their descendants have made of them, Berlin memorably said: ‘few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated (TCE 16–17). Williams echoes this sentiment more epigragrammatically and mordantly: ‘If philosophers are going to be influential, it is as well that they should be misunderstood.’7 Matters become more interesting with the next step of Williams’ argument, which he introduces by saying that ‘the point of any history, one might suppose, is to achieve some distance from the present, which can help one to understand the present.’8 He complicates this virtual bromide by grafting upon it Nietzsche’s view of classical philology, that it has the potential to make the familiar seem strange and the strange less alien. But for philosophy to have a chance of realising the potential insights of historical self-­ consciousness, its practitioners need to resist two powerful tendencies: the first is to treat the object of our historical enquiry as if it were our contemporary, as this ‘loses the point of historical distance altogether’, and the second is the tendency to adopt, consciously or not, a quasi-Hegelian view of the past which sees things progressively and self-fulfillingly leading to where happen to be. The first of these temptations is the more difficult of the two to avoid. Walking the tightrope of keeping a fitful historical distance so that we are capable of making the sort of historical insight that ‘will be strange enough to help us to question our present situation and the received picture of the tradition’ is far from easy. As one of Williams’ more recent commentators puts it: We cannot treat the history of philosophy as contemporary without losing the point of historical distance; the history of philosophy should yield philosophy, but it should not yield our philosophy.9

Fortunately, Williams himself provides us with a powerful illustration of such an account of the past in Shame and Necessity. That book asks the question of what we can learn from the ancient pre-Socratic Greek world,  The Sense of the Past, 25.  Bernard Williams, ‘Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy’ in his The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, Myles Burnyeat, ed. (2006: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 258. 9  Matthieu Queloz, ‘Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy’, Studia Philosophica, The Swiss Journal of Philosophy 76, 2017, 150. 7 8

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the world of Homer and the great tragedians. Williams’ answer is characteristically imaginative and insightful and is conveyed in a style that captures his distinctive sense of perception. His interpretation of the ancient Greeks does not conform to some variation on the conventional perspectives that, on the one hand, we have either outlived or appropriated the essential lessons of the ancients or, on the other hand, that we need to turn the clock back and substitute the glory that was Homeric Greece for the incurable malaise that is modernity or postmodernity. He affirms that we have much to learn from the Greeks, but not in the way we might have thought or wish to admit—given our discussion in the previous chapter, it is hard not to reflect on what Vico would have made of Williams’ attitude to Homer. What particularly attracts Williams’ attention about the Homeric Age is that it was an age without God (though there were, of course, gods) as well as one that preceded Plato and his immense philosophical legacy. As a Godless culture it could and did put human character rather than the commands of an omniscient, omnipotent and ubiquitous Being at centre stage. Also, being pre-Platonic meant that it did not measure the moral worth of our lives from the perspective of a peculiarly autonomous and overarching form of moral rationalism. Williams opens up a radically new, quasi-Nietzschean panorama which permits us to see our more neglected ancient forebears afresh, as if for the first time, untouched by the biases of our predominantly Platonic and Christian intellectual inheritance. The resulting impression can be summarised in the rather hackneyed but apt phrase strangely familiar. Without ignoring or down-playing the various ways in which the ancient Greeks remain profoundly strange to us, he makes the radical claim that their ideas ‘were different from ours and also in better condition.’10 Chief among these is the idea at the heart of Greek tragedy that ‘what is great is fragile’. The still prevailing influence of the Platonic and Christian moral outlooks with their very different but shared insistence on the possibility and desirability of insulating the morally significant from the vagaries of time and chance resulted in our losing sight of this earlier tradition that offers us a more faithful account of the precariousness and contingency of our moral lives, of what one of Williams’ students memorably called ‘the fragility of goodness’.11 In this way, Williams’ 10  Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993: University of Californian Press, Berkeley, CA), 4. 11  Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). While Nussbaum explicitly reg-

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treatment of Greek epic and tragedy accentuates the wisdom of Nietzsche’s memorable remark that ‘The Greeks were superficial out of profundity’. It should be obvious by now that Williams’ interpretation of the ancient Greeks is not one that would occur to most of us. There is nothing stereotypical about Williams’ way of making sense of Greek epic and tragic literature. Moreover, by the time he had given the Sather Lectures at Berkeley in 1989, which were later published as Shame and Necessity (1993), he had reached a number of pivotal verdicts about moral and political philosophy which had informed the spirit of his lectures. He indicates what these are at the end of the book: We are in an ethical condition that lies not only beyond Christianity, but beyond its Kantian and its Hegelian legacies. We have an ambivalent sense of what human beings have achieved, and have hopes for how they might live (in particular, in the form of a still powerful ideal that they should live without lies). We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells, no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities. We have to acknowledge the hideous costs of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective sense itself, and recognise that there is no redemptive Hegelian history or universal Leibnizian cost-benefit analysis to show that it will come out well enough in the end. In important ways, we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime. More particularly, we are like those who, from the fifth century and earlier, have left us traces of a consciousness that had not yet been touched by Plato’s and Aristotle’s attempts to make our ethical relations to the world fully intelligible.12

This passage underlines why Williams’ outlook is both arresting and disturbing. It raises a fundamental question about the basis and rectitude of our contemporary moral beliefs and biases. If his diagnosis is right or, at least, more right than wrong, then the very moral ground upon which we

isters her debt to Williams, her book puts forward the view that the ancient Greek tragedians were as concerned with trying to contain contingency as they were with acknowledging its inescapable existence and impact on living a good life. Nussbaum also claims that the contrast Williams draws between pre-Platonic and post-Platonic Greek thought in relation to luck is not as pronounced as Williams affirms. 12  Shame and Necessity, 166.

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rely is more contingent and unstable than many of us may assume or moral philosophers are prepared to admit. Of course, Williams’ highly critical assessment of modern  moral philosophy did not begin in 1989. Shame and Necessity incorporates and builds upon the various insights that he had been arriving at in the 1970s and 1980s, insights that are articulated most forcibly in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). There are two aspects of his outlook that are especially pertinent to our discussion. The first is his insistence that philosophy is fundamentally a humanistic (as distinct from a scientific) discipline  and, secondly, his rejection of  rationalistic  moral theory. These two elements of his thought will be discussed shortly. But, first, I wish to address briefly a rather obvious objection: why bother thinking about history at all when it comes to making sense of our lives? Why can’t we make sense of our lives without the alleged aid of history?

Thinking for Ourselves In the preceding chapter, I described as facile the advice that Skinner gave in his earlier and more combative years that ‘we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves.’13 But perhaps my dismissal of Skinner’s atypically glib remark was too quick and easy. For surely there is something to be said for thinking for ourselves, for relying on our own innate reason, especially if the verdict of history is that we have managed to get more things wrong than right by thinking that we share more with the past than we really do. Why not follow the example of the sixteenth-century Spanish sceptic and physician, Francisco Sanches, who stated ‘To say “thus spake the Master” is unworthy of a philosopher; better to trust our own native wit’?’14 Moreover, isn’t it the case that the fortunes of political philosophy  Nobody is seriously questioning that we cannot and do not think for ourselves in any kind of normal, everyday sense of that phrase. We can and we do think for ourselves every day in all sorts of ways without thinking about it. But what we are talking about here is the extent to which we can produce a distinctively philosophical account of political morality that is independent of a consideration of history and a minimal level of historical self-consciousness. 14  Francisco Sanches, That Nothing is Known. I am indebted for this reference to John Cottingham’s paper ‘Why Should Analytic Philosophers Do History of Philosophy?’ in Tom Sorell and G.A J. Rogers eds. Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy (2005: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 25. Henry Hardy has pointed out to me that Cottingham’s for13

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in the twentieth century really improved only when the subject broke free from the dead hand of history? John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice seemed to demonstrate that it is possible to bring normative political philosophy back from near death if we are prepared to make the effort to do our own thinking about our present problems. But a moment’s reflection reveals that the ‘rebirth’ of analytic political philosophy in the aftermath of Rawls’ seminal work turned out to be more of a false dawn. And we shouldn’t let the proliferation of periodicals and books on normative political theory and applied ethics since the early 1970s cloud the sobering fact that the subject continues to suffer from a crippling identity crisis. To paraphrase Dean Acheson’s famous remark about the end of the British Empire, political theory is a discipline that has lost its presumed authority and has yet to find a new and credible role.15 The stellar rise and terminal decline of A Theory of Justice provides as good a case study as any of the limitations of blankly ahistorical normative political theorising.16 Rawls’ subsequent Political Liberalism (1993) was as much a farewell to the methodological assumptions and universalistic moral ambitions of his earlier work as it was a recognition that any plausible account of liberal justice had to be ‘political, not metaphysical’.17 Does this mean that contemporary political theory is pointless? Not necessarily. But it does mean that  most hyper-rationalistic and historically unselfconscious moral and  political theory is a waste of time and that is mulation of Sanches’ remark is more of a loose paraphrase than a strict translation of the original text: ‘Hinc illorum Αὐτὸϛ ἔφα tam illiberum, indignúmque Philosopho’ [‘Hence their “He himself said it”, so unfree, and unworthy of a philosopher’]. Franciscus Sanchez, Quod nihil scitur (1581: Antonius Gryphius [printer], Lyon), 7–8. 15  ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’, Dean Acheson, Speech at Westpoint (5 December, 1962). 16  One could, of course, point to more obvious and putatively successful forms of contemporary academic political discourse such as, for example, rational choice theory. But even here the political relevance and benefits of such enquiries are far from transparent. Moreover, as Richard Tuck has revealed in his Free Riding (2008: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), despite the prevalence of the economic model of human behaviour, there is nothing inevitable or natural about the still dominant trend of defining rationality in terms of purely instrumental reason. 17  Rawls, John. “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, 3 (1985): 223–51.

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preciely what makes up the vast majority of that genre. No doubt its ethical and poltical aspirations are worthy, and it has kept a lot of academics gainfully employed for the past fifty years or so, but such considerations are hardly sufficient to vouchsafe it as an intellectually honest and viable subject. One of the more obvious and revealing questions that one might ask any self-respecting contemporary political theorist is ‘Who is your audience?’ The obvious and unhelpful rejoinder is ‘My students.’ What this answer fails to provide is a compelling case for the independent  intellectual authority and practical urgency of the subject. Asking such awkward questions can, of course, raise the suspicion that the questions themselves have their source in some form of philistinism or more sinister anti-intellectual motivation. But such suspicions should not let academic political theorists off the hook.18 To assert otherwise is to commit a rather blatant form of trahison des clercs. And yet there are more and less culpable ways for philosophers to betray their vocation. Among the more common tactics is to convince themselves that history can be rendered an essentially innocuous, assimilable or irrelevant force. What I mean by this is the set of assumptions associated with the belief that the mere act of acknowledging that we are children of our past is enough to disarm or domesticate history. Williams himself is guilty, if only fleetingly, of this tendency in the opening sentence of a paper he wrote in 1981: ‘The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.’19 This generalisation resembles other generalisations that intellectuals are fond of making. More culpable  examples in this vein include Alfred North Whitehead’s memorable ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’, Steven Pinker’s ‘The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, 18  One is reminded in this context of Auden’s remark that poetry ‘makes nothing happen’. Contemporary political theory makes little or not happen but in an absurd and indefensible way, given the nominally practical focus of its interest. As always, there are a few contemporary political theorists who buck the trend. Any list that would include their miniscule number would surely feature Brian Barry (1936–2009). Barry did his level best to improve political theory during his lifetime and began his campaign in his alma mater, Oxford, where he summarised the state of the subject in the 1950s in the following pejorative but hardly inaccurate terms: ‘Warmed-over facts with a topping of Times editorializing seemed to be the formula.’ ‘The Strange Death of Political Philosophy’, republished in his Democracy and Power: Essays in Political Theory 1 (1991: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 12. 19  Bernard Williams, ‘The Legacy of Greek Philosophy’ in M. I. Finley The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal (1981: Oxford University Press, Oxford), reprinted in B.  Williams, The Sense of the Past, 3.

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trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book [Enlightenment Now] because I have come to realise that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism and progress need a wholehearted defense’ and W. V. Quine’s mordant ‘People enter philosophy for one of two reasons: some are interested in the history of philosophy and some in philosophy itself.’20 What we have here are three different ways of being untrue to the past: Whitehead distorts the past by grossly exaggerating its legacy, Pinker by making it his schmaltzy best friend and Quine by rendering it entirely redundant. Williams is among those who help us to see the need for a more grown­up and realistic way of being philosophical about history and being historical about philosophy. And like Berlin, he shows that one of the keys to understanding why history is necessary to most philosophy—rather than merely a form of intellectual window dressing—lies in identifying the subject as an essentially humanistic discipline. Characterising it in these terms has the effect of inhibiting us from taking an unscrupulously condescending view of the past and a densely smug view of the present: one of the common ways that philosophy patronises the past is by allowing only those aspects of it that are deemed worthy of entry into contemporary philosophical debate, which is effectively another way of saying that philosophy can be carried out in wholly contemporary terms. The idea that history has lessons to teach us loses its meaning if those lessons conform to our unreflective yearnings; as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four tells us, the only way to disarm the past is either to forget it or obliterate it by reproducing it in the state’s (Oceania’s) image and likeness. More positively, history can awaken us to the rich, unsettling and often deeply iconoclastic resources of the past and to the possibility of seeing that a genuinely historical form of philosophical reflection provides us with a more fertile and candid way of grounding our allegiance to liberalism. History shows that it is bigger than liberalism (or any other ideology) and one of the ways it reveals this is by showing that the emergence of a liberal, tolerant form of society was neither inevitable nor necessarily an unadulterated good. As a result, we have no reason to assume that it will last forever or, as Skinner powerfully argues, that the past doesn’t contain vital insights about both 20  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929: Free Press, New York), 39, Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (2018: Allen Lane, London), 4, Quine’s line is attributed to him by Alasdair MacIntyre; see Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past’ in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, eds. Richard Rorty, Quentin Skinner and J. B. Schneewind (1984: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 39–40.

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the shortcomings of liberalism and potentially better ideas about how we might organise our individual and collective lives. Knowing how we got here is indispensable to being true to ourselves and our present situation.

Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline Our starting point is Williams’ late essay ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’.21 According to Williams, what makes philosophy primarily a humanistic subject, argues Williams, is its focus on ‘making sense of ourselves and of our activities.’22 What defines it as a discipline is its commitment to ‘getting things right.’23 What he means by ‘making sense of ourselves and of our activities’ is, unsurprisingly, complex and nuanced but his principal motivation for calling philosophical enquiry humanistic is to contrast it with scientific enquiry, which is primarily concerned with ‘describing the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective’. Williams introduces this contrast not to show that philosophy is inferior (or superior) to science but as a way of amplifying the different relations that science and philosophy have with history. The nub of the difference between science’s view of its past and philosophy’s relation with its past is, as we have indicated already, that a scientist typically does not need to know about his subject’s past in the way that a philosopher typically does. A physicist or microbiologist will not be hampered in successfully pursuing his chosen field of study as a result of neglecting the history of his respective domain of professional focus. The same cannot be said of a philosopher, unless perhaps he is specialising in a branch of the philosophy of science or logic. The reason for this difference, according to Williams, lies in the fact that the history of science is fundamentally ‘a history of discovery’ whereas the history of philosophy 21  Bernard Williams, ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Disciple’ Philosophy 75, 2000; republished in his Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, A.  W. Moore ed. (2006: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 180–199. It is not entirely clear if Williams’ conviction that philosophy is a humanistic discipline happened as a result of his recognition that philosophy needs history or vice versa. My hunch is that Williams’ historical turn preceded his growing sense of philosophy as a humanistic subject but, in any case, the two things were or became largely inseparable for him. The key point is that for Williams a major reason why philosophy is a humanistic discipline is because of its special relationship with history: understanding how and why history has such a purchase on philosophy goes a long way towards explaining why it is a humanistic discipline. 22  Ibidem, 197. 23  Ibidem, 180.

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cannot, typically, be characterised in this way: the history of science can be coherently and credibly understood, up to a point, as a series of progressive steps in which relevant parties can view each new step as a genuine improvement on the previous one.24 Another way that Williams captures this alleged difference is by arguing that philosophy cannot give a vindicatory account of how it got to where it is in the way that science can and does. From a scientistic perspective, the foregoing might read as a prelude to a dismissal of the history of philosophy as, at best, an optional intellectual pursuit and of the subject of philosophy itself as a rationally unviable enterprise. But Williams intends quite the opposite point and his argument is characteristically illuminating. He begins by conceding what seems like quite a lot on behalf of philosophy but he helpfully builds his argument illustratively by looking at how certain ethical and political concepts typically behave. Unlike the history of science, in which each new major scientific discovery or breakthrough can be explained in straightforwardly explanatory and vindicatory terms as an objective enhancement of what preceded it, we cannot say that the victory of certain political concepts over others, such as those of the French Revolution prevailing over those of the ancien regime, occurred in the same epistemologically justificatory way for the reason that they cannot be said to have ‘won an argument’. In other words, the undeniable historical triumph of liberty, equality and fraternity over the norms and values of a hierarchical and religious society cannot be explained as an epistemically or metaphysically based moral step forward to the satisfaction of all sections of society at the time. And the reason for the unavailability of such a vindication, of what Williams calls a ‘cognitive genealogy of liberalism’, lies in the irreducible contingency of what is victorious and what is vanquished in these cases. In this regard, history is written by the victor but we can’t let his version deceive us.25 The realisation that the political winners cannot enjoy their victory in an epistemologically vindicatory manner marks only the first step in what we might call Williams’ genealogical disenchantment thesis. Indeed, the next step might be considered the most crucial one. For we now know something about how we got here that we didn’t know or fully appreciate before,  Ibidem, 189.  Truth and Truthfulness, 264. He contends that the difficulty of the demand for a cognitive genealogy of liberalism resides in giving ‘the impression of a self-contained moral vision, which at once raises the question of how it arrived on earth,’ 24 25

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that something can be expressed as the realisation of the ineliminable contingency of our moral and political beliefs. The challenge of this historicist insight is how we make sense of it and what we ultimately do with it. Another way of articulating this predicament might be as follows: If we think that Hegel may have been correct when he said that ‘Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thought’ but find his teleological theory of history ludicrous, then how ought we understand and, if possible, justify liberalism in our current moral situation?26 Is it possible for our moral and political assumptions and preferences to survive the recognition of contingency? It hardly needs saying that no political morality or ideology is exempt from the insight of our historicity,  least of all the postmodern myth that a  recognition of our historicity permits us to escape its clutches. The destructive or, at least, destabilising impact of such a truth is as globally fundamental as it is unavoidable. This brings us back to where we began the chapter. Recall that Williams pinpointed the originality and importance of Berlin’s liberalism in a certain kind of combined epistemological and ethical commitment: What truth is it that is known to someone who recognises the ultimate plurality of values? In philosophical abstraction, it will be that there are such values, and, put in that blank way, it can be taken to speak for an objective order of values which some forms of consciousness (notably the liberal form) are better than others at recognising. But that way of putting it is very blank indeed. It is more characteristic of Berlin’s outlook, and more illuminating in itself, to say that one who properly recognises the plurality of values is one who understands the deep and creative role that these various values can play in human life. In that perspective, the correctness of the liberal consciousness is better expressed, not so much in terms of truth – that it recognises the values which indeed there are – but in terms of truthfulness. (CC2 xxxviii)

Williams distils the essence of Berlin’s defence of liberalism better than Berlin ever managed (or even tried). Williams also stayed true to Berlin’s example in the manner in which he approached the central question of ‘how to make sense of ourselves’. There are a number of features of Williams’ work on liberalism that strike me as a particularly faithful development of Berlin’s justification of a liberal, tolerant society. There are also 26  G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of a Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox with intro. By Stephen Houlgate (2008 ed.: Oxford University Press, Oxford), Preface, 15.

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two aspects of Williams’ view of liberalism and, more broadly, of philosophy that seems to me to be in tension with Berlin’s position. The first Berlinian feature of Williams’ thought is his serious effort to grapple with the phenomenon of historical understanding. Like Berlin, Williams is interested in working out what it is and what it implies. He knows that we can never have enough historical knowledge when it comes to comprehending our lives, but he also doesn’t let this challenge tip him over into an overwhelmed, defeated silence. In this respect he thinks we can remain loyal to the analytic ‘principle that small and good is better than broad and bad.’ without denying the truth that when it comes to history, ‘we all need to know more than we can hope to know’.27 Towards the end of his paper ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, he gives some helpful advice to young aspiring philosophers who may feel overwhelmed by the potentially crippling insight of historicity. He recommends ‘thinking of one ethical ideal, and the various considerations that might help one understand it’.28 That was precisely what Berlin had done almost fifty years earlier in his inaugural lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, and it’s what Williams ended up doing in his final book, Truth and Truthfulness. Both works share a philosophical commitment to taking history seriously and showing in the process that moral and political philosophy is at its most honest and productive when it ceases to regard itself as a branch or, worse still, a poor relation of science and, instead, fulfils its true remit as a humanistic and unapologetically ‘impure’ form of enquiry.29 It favours the authentic grittiness and incorrigible untidiness of human life over the artificial neatness and spurious completeness of rationalistic moral and political theory. However, they exemplify an historically informed conception of philosophy in different ways. Berlin’s starting point is Vico whereas Williams’ is Nietzsche. Berlin brings his own version of philosophical anthropology to life through his extra-historical studies of mainly Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, whereas Williams tends to exploit the slightly more detached model of genealogical enquiry, exemplified most effectively in his treatment of certain aspects of the ideas and culture that prevailed in pre-Socratic Greece. Yet they both recoil from what they  ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, 197.  Ibidem, 197. 29  Richard Moran provides a theoretically fine-grained discussion of the ‘impure’ or protean nature of Williams’ philosophical vision in his ‘Williams, History and the “impurity of Philosophy”’ in Richard Moran, The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays (2017: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 185–201. 27 28

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regard as the extremes of radical historicism and ahistoricism and, instead, pursue a middle path which seeks to be respectful of the pastness of the past without giving up on the idea that the past is a rich philosophical resource that can have a direct bearing on our contemporary reflections about the individual and society. The next feature of Williams’ philosophical vision that resonates with Berlin is the refusal to disconnect a concern for truth from our understanding and, more ambitiously, defence of politics. This is important, since Berlin’s justification of liberalism can appear sufficiently un-­ metaphysical to tempt certain philosophers to appropriate him as a proto-­ post-­ modernist. For example, Richard Rorty launched the most conspicuous attempt to recruit Berlin as a post-truth, post-foundational liberal: he sought to enlist Berlin as a thinker who saw that the failure of the Enlightenment Project as spelling the end of truth and, therefore, any possible role for truth in grounding liberalism, or any other ideology for that matter. Williams shows that Rorty’s ironic brand of ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ amounts to a ‘phenomenon of counterfactual scientism’ in which much of the distinctive appeal of liberalism is diminished by virtue of its not being what Rorty secretly wants it to be, that is, a political creed that has the unique blessing of some supreme and immanent metaphysics.30 Neither Berlin nor Williams suffers from the if God is dead, everything is meaningless syndrome, and therefore, neither share nor endorse Rorty’s willingness to dispense with the truth and embrace postmodern antifoundationalism. But it isn’t just postmodern thinkers who think that truth does not belong to the sphere of politics. The conventional standpoint adopted by liberals is that truth and politics should be kept separate for fear that permitting truth claims sanction political views will open up the gates to an authoritarian or paternalistic state. Berlin and Williams share a belief that traditional justifications of a liberal society suffer from excessive epistemological abstinence. They chart an alternative way of grounding liberalism on a principled recognition of the truth (and not merely the sociological fact) of value pluralism which means that truth and knowledge do not just have a legitimate place in liberal politics but become a vital source of its vindication and appeal. There is a wonderful 30  I critically discuss Rorty’s (mis)appropriation of Berlin’s defence of liberalism at length in my book The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury, London). I also put forward a way of interpreting Berlin’s political philosophy that seeks to reconcile his recognition of contingency with his qualified avowal of a truth-based justification of liberalism.

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line near the end of Williams’ early essay ‘Deciding to Believe’ where he states ‘belief aims at truth, knowledge does not similarly aim at completeness’.31 The acuity of that remark is particularly relevant here; the type of knowledge that is available to ground our belief in liberalism is necessarily finite and incomplete but is no less a form of knowledge and no less disqualified from aiming at truth. Of course, the putative meta-ethical truth of value pluralism does not ground liberalism in the direct way that ethically loaded political values such as justice or equality typically aspire to do. The relevance of value pluralism to liberalism is more oblique and equivocal. The very possibility, let alone cogency, of value pluralism having relevance depends on a range of factors, not least the notion that truth itself has a legitimate and significant role in political life. It is the recognition of the truth of the plurality of human values and ideals which furnishes the epistemological and ethical appreciation that value pluralism is ‘not simply a contingency of modern life, but an important vehicle of ethical expression.’32 Furthermore, the sort of irony that is likely to derive from an understanding of pervasive moral diversity and disagreement, or of what one notable philosopher has called ‘the fragmentation of value’, is not of a characteristically post-­ modern kind.33 Whereas someone like Rorty responds to the recognition of value pluralism and fragmentation by introducing a distinction between the private and the public, between the personal realm of the ironist who personifies the consciousness of contingency and the political sphere of the ethicist who favours the live and let live code of ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’, Berlin and Williams are not tempted by such a bifurcatory coping strategy. They have a more realistic and intellectually honest grasp of the contingency of human affairs and the plurality of values. Their response to the truth of contingency and radical pluralism informs their shared conviction that liberalism offers the optimal moral and political arrangement for where we find ourselves today. It is not a conviction based on the incredible idea that the truth, especially one captured by a self-­contained moral theory, could literally and sufficiently bind a liberal society together. Rather it is one that is rooted in the less philosophically ambitious but 31  ‘Deciding to Believe’ (1970), reprinted in Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (1972: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 151. 32  Bernard Williams, ‘Contemporary philosophy: a second look’ in Nicolas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James eds., The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (1996: Blackwell, Oxford), 35. 33  Thomas Nagel, ‘The Fragmentation of Value’ published in his Mortal Questions (1979: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 128–41.

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more historically plausible idea that a liberal pluralist society offers the most reflectively robust and political reliable obstacle to the ever-present threat of institutional deceit and arbitrary power and violence. The preservation of toleration, democracy, equality, liberty and the rule of law relies on a society that values the importance of truth and unprejudiced assent in public life. For belonging to such a society and being the kind of person who values such liberal and civilised principles make it more difficult for state brutality and humiliation to occur. As we shall see in the next section, both thinkers are far more impressed by the negative virtues of liberalism than by the more relentlessly optimistic and self-congratulatory formulations of ‘high libearlism’. The less sanguine version of liberalism is anchored in the sobering truths about ourselves that history has disclosed and in the realisation that we can never be too vigilant about the threats posed by unchecked political deception and by the unaccountability of public institutions and representatives to the dictates of transparency and truth. The third salient way in which Williams echoes and deepens Berlin’s vision is his scepticism regarding the point and ambition of rationalistic moral theory. Berlin formulated his rejection of the dominant rationalist and universalist strain within the Western philosophical tradition through his critique of moral monism. His opposition to monism invariably took the form of a rejection of the fundamentally Platonic view that all objective human ideals and ethical values are compatible with one another and form part of an all-encompassing rational system. Williams extended and intensified this sceptical line of thought by taking on the two leading moral theories of the Enlightenment—Benthamite utilitarianism and Kantian deontology. Unlike Platonic forms of monism which emphasise the ultimate harmony of moral values and human ends, utilitarian and deontological moral theories are less metaphysically ambitious but are still wedded to the claim there exists an objective moral yardstick capable of weighing and ranking the relative worth of moral values and obligations and producing a uniquely correct and unassailable resolution of normative questions. The fact that we no longer find Bentham’s or Kant’s solutions to our ethical problems feasible or even salvageable is largely a tribute to their exposure to Williams’ subtle and systematic assault. Williams expands and sharpens Berlin’s anti-monism, with the result that we get a better grasp of the complex and shifting reality of our moral lives. In fact, the vividness and cogency of their shared pluralism prompts us to wonder how monism managed to be so influential for so long. And yet monism does not exist only in the heads of philosophers. It pervades,

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in cruder and semi-conscious ways, the mindset of most of us. The assumption that if only we were more rational in our thoughts and deeds the world would eventually free itself of moral conflict and political struggle is still a pervasive one among humankind. It is also an assumption that has driven the human race to many of the most noble as well as atrocious actions throughout history, not least in the last hundred years. But whether monism has been a force for good or ill, it is, they believe, untrue, and that should count for something as long as we consider truth important. The aspect of Williams’ outlook that does not exactly align with Berlin’s vision is his far more strict distinction, even dichotomy, between science and ethics. Following the publication of his book on Descartes, Williams became increasingly keen to promulgate what he referred to as ‘the absolute conception of reality’, a term of reference designed to capture what the world is anyway, independently of what we happen to think it is. While Williams is enough of a Kantian to deny that the world can describe itself for us or that we can achieve a completely perspectiveless view of reality, nonetheless, he did remain tied to the notion that the absolute conception of reality represents the coherent and reachable ideal of our least mind-­dependent representation of the world. Berlin’s position on this matter is far from clear; at times he holds a Humean view of reality when it comes to the external world and, at others, he adopts a neo-Kantian view of our grasp of reality. But either way, he doesn’t allow his metaphysical view of the physical world significantly affect or compromise his view of the epistemological status of ethics to the extent that Williams does: I believe that in relation to ethics there is a genuine and profound difference [from science] to be found, and also … that the difference is enough to motivate some version of the feeling … that science has some chance of being more or less what it seems … while ethical thought has no chance of being everything it seems.34

Unlike Williams, Berlin is more prepared to grant the attribution of objectivity and truth to  ethical  values. Part of the difference between them is likely to have its source in their contrasting  views of Kant’s critical 34  Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 134–5.

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philosophy. We know that Berlin reinterpreted Kant’s Copernican revolution to generate a more anthropological and historicised account of our  categories and concepts of thought which enable us to understand ourselves and others. Williams was perhaps too much of a Wittgensteinian to sign-up to such a theory. Resolving the question of which view is more coherent and plausible is beyond the scope of this chapter but the following footnote suggests that the difference between them may not be as great as it seems.35 However, there are two other dimensions of this difference between Berlin and Williams that I wish to discuss briefly. The first concerns Williams’ resistance to granting ethics objective status. Like Berlin, Williams believes that it is coherent and correct to argue in favour of the possibility and existence of ethical knowledge. But he is not willing to interpret ethical knowledge as objective in the way that he claims scientific knowledge is entitled to objective standing. His rejection of ethical objectivity is based on what he regarded as the crucial difference between the explanation of convergence in scientific knowledge and of the more contingently-based convergence that may or may not occur in our ethical outlooks: In a scientific enquiry there should ideally be convergence on the answer, where the best explanation of the convergence involves the idea that the answer represents how things are; in the area of the ethical, at least at a high level of generality, there is no such coherent hope.36 35  We have noted in earlier chapters Berlin’s view that the difference in the stability between our categories and concepts of thought about the physical world and our more humanistic categories and concepts is a matter of degree rather than kind and that both sets of concepts and categories, even the most ‘permanent’ and ‘universal’, are susceptible to drastic change. Berlin’s perspective contrasts sharply with Williams’ endorsement of the absolute conception of reality and his fundamental distinction between science and ethics. But I think the sharpness and possible significance of the difference between them is softened after reading Williams’ paper ‘Wittgenstein and idealism’ (in Moral Luck, 144–163). In that essay Williams suggests that the solipsistic idea that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ of the Tractatus is susceptible in later Wittgenstein to a transcendental idealist interpretation in which the solipsistic ‘I’ becomes the plural ‘We’. And crucially, the ‘We’ is not necessarily or even plausibly the ‘We’ only ‘of our group as contrasted with other human groups’ but the undifferentiated ‘We’ of humanity or as Williams describes us ‘the plural descendant of the idealist I.’ 160. Furthermore, if Williams’ interpretation of this aspect of later Wittgenstein is plausible then the contrast we drew between Berlin’s pluralism and Wittgenstein’s alleged relativism in the previous chapter is far less acute. 36  Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 136.

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Endowing ethics with objective status amounts, for Williams, to an unwarranted application of our thumb on the epistemological scales. While it is doubtful that Berlin would want to enter into a debate about Williams’ scientific realism, it’s more likely that he would wish to contest Williams’ denial of objective status to ethics. Berlin’s understanding of ethics does not exhibit anything like the same level of preoccupation that Williams shows for unfavourably contrasting the epistemological grounding of ethics and science at the court of naturalism. As we have seen, Berlin’s belief in ethical objectivism is not based on the implausible metaphysical idea that the truths of ethics mirror or track some transcendent moral world or noumena in the way that scientific truths are thought, at least commonsensically, to correspond to the mind-independent, external world. Rather his is an internally-based, historically-generated conception of moral objectivism that resists what he regards as invidious and misleading comparisons with the scientific model of the world. Whereas Williams is keen to juxtapose the differences between the cognitive status of science and ethics with the aim of getting a firmer grasp of what can count as having truly  objective status, Berlin tends to accentuate the epistemological autonomy and integrity of ethical thought and experience.37 Of course, another point worth emphasising here is that Williams is theoretically explicit and sophisticated in a way that Berlin never really attempted. Williams provides a systematic response to a question that Ernest Gellner once posed about ‘how are the concepts in terms of which we see ourselves and live our lives to be related to those we take seriously as genuine knowledge of this world?’38 But I think it would be wrong to infer that Williams’ understanding of the epistemological status of ethics is necessarily superior to Berlin’s for that reason. A philosophical account is not rendered truer because it is armed with more elaborate theoretical detail and sophistication. Moreover, Williams is frequently prone to tying himself in quasi-scientistic knots as a result of drawing an excessively strict dichotomy between science and ethics that can end up making ethics look less objective and science more objective than either actually is or needs to

37  See Alan Thomas, Context and Value (2006: Oxford University Press, Oxford), for a meticulous and sophisticated critique of Williams’ ethical non-objectivism as well as a very interesting contextualist defence of ethical objectivism. 38  Ernest Gellner, ‘Crisis in Humanities and the Mainstream of Philosophy’ in J. H. Plumb ed., Crisis in the Humanities (1964: Penguin, London), 78–9.

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be thought to be.39 Hilary Putnam has pinpointed the source of this weakness in Williams’ outlook. He argues that Williams wrongly assumes that unless we accept his version of scientific realism with its reliance on his notorious ‘absolute conception of reality’ we are left with the unenviable choice between scientism or scepticism. In a spirit that is implicitly sympathetic to Berlin’s vision, Putnam counters Williams’ misplaced pessismism by emphasising that we live in an inherently perspectival world which inescapably mirrors our own necessarily parochial human interests: But we are not forced to choose between scientism and skepticism in the way Williams thinks. The third possibility is to accept the position we are fated to occupy in any case, the position of beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values, but who are, for all that, committed to regarding some views of the world – and for that matter, some interests and values – as better than others.40

39  See Hilary Putnam’s critique of Williams’ absolute conception of the external world and its distorting effect on his understanding of the distinction between science and ethic in his Renewing Philosophy (1992: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 80–107. See also John McDowell’s deft review of Williams in Mind 95, 1986, 379–86. Bernard Williams’ review of Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face is also worth reading in his Essays and Reviews 1959–2002 (2014: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 320–26. 40  Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (1990: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 178. Williams’ review of Putnam’s book in the London Review of Books ended as follows:

A distinction between metaphysical realism and internal realism makes sense only in terms of a diagram drawn by metaphysical; realism itself. Once this lesson is properly learned, perhaps philosophers will be less anxious about saying what most people say, that the aim of science is to tell us what the world is like, as opposed to ways in which it seems (peculiarly) to us. Some may also think – it is certainly a separate question – that this is one of many ways in which science is different from ethics.’ republished in Bernard Williams, Essays and Reviews 1959–2002 (2014: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) 326. It is not obvious to this author that Williams distinction or the alleged lesson that springs from it are as unavoidable as he claims. Moreover, it’s interesting to note Williams’ late equivocations about the ‘absolute conception of the world’ in his paper ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, 184–88 and in his final work Truth and Truthfulness, 295n19. It seems Williams was having second thoughts after all.

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One particular area in which Williams allows his denial of moral objectivism overreach itself is in his discussion of thin and thick moral concepts. Much of what he says about the distinction between thin moral concepts such as ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘duty’ and thick ones such as ‘treachery’, ‘courage’, ‘brutality’ is acute and revealing, especially his central claim that thick concepts are far more plausible candidates for moral knowledge since they are descriptively rich as well as action-guiding. But as Martin Hollis persuasively argues Williams underestimates the action-guidedness of less thick moral concepts such as ‘just’, ‘rational’ or ‘kindness’ which need context but in a less entangled way than thicker moral concepts.41 It is possible to interpret this difference between Berlin and Williams as a function of a much deeper difference between them. Berlin is less inclined than Williams to posit a robust epistemological dichotomy between science and ethics. As we saw in the third chapter, Berlin views the philosophical d ­ ifference between our naturalistic concepts and categories of thought and our more distinctively humanistic ones as a matter of degree rather than of kind and is therefore less prepared than Williams to sign up to such a robust form of realism in which the mind-independent world is conferring truth on our thoughts. This raises a particularly deep question about Berlin’s position in respect of our understanding and knowledge about the material world. Is Berlin philosophically committed to the view that our knowledge is answerable 41  Martin Hollis, ‘The shape of a life’ in J. E. J Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams (1995: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 170–84. Also relevant here is John Kekes critique of Williams which makes the key point that:

‘Williams’ ingenious arguments show only what we knew all along, namely, that our beliefs are influenced by our context. But they do not show that the truth of our evaluations depends on our context.’ John Kekes, The Human Condition (2010: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 204–5. Kekes may have a point but not necessarily in the way he suggests. The crucial question that Kekes doesn’t address is the cultural and historical scope of ‘we’. Williams may be guilty of exaggerating the degree of entanglement of certain moral concepts and ideals in specific contexts but he was not unaware of the broader and deeper question of who is included in ‘we’. See Bernard Williams, ‘Wittgenstein and idealism’ in his Moral Luck (1981: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 144–63. Finally, there is an excellent discussion of the Williams versus Putnam debate by Simon Blackburn in Daniel Calcutt ed., Reading Bernard Williams (2009: Routledge, London), 9–23.

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to the objects of a mind-independent reality or is he aligned with a more non-realist view that the objects of the world follow the structure of our mind-dependent thought and knowledge? While Berlin’s more forthright neo-Kantian moments suggest that he is committed to a species of, at a minimum, partial idealism, there is also the unmistakable sense that he is an adherent of common-sense realism. There is, in my view, no way of satisfactorily resolving this matter but one way of moderating this tension is to introduce a distinction between ontological realism and epistemological idealism in which the former affirms the existence of a world beyond our experience, while the latter denies the possibility of our knowing the world as it is in itself. This distinction permits us to label Berlin, not implausibly, an ontological realist as well as an empirical idealist. A less presumptuous interpretive option is to infer from Berlin’s relative silence on the matter, that the realism/anti-realism dichotomy is not as philosophically unavoidable or crucial as some, like Williams, wish us to believe. It is possible that he shared something of Strawson’s relaxed and non-­ binary view of the matter. In a reply to another thinker on this precise question, Strawson argued: Fundamentally, and perhaps unfairly, I fancy I detect in Dr. Szubka, as in Kant himself (with his gesture towards ‘intellectual intuition’), a kind of yearning, which both would acknowledge to be humanly unfulfillable, for a species of insight into reality ‘‘as it is in itself’ which transcends our cognitive schemes and capacities altogether. But the fulfilment of the unfulfillable, the satisfaction of the unsatisfiable, cannot be a necessary condition of the rational acceptance of epistemological and metaphysical realism. Realism, reasonably understood, is the unarticulated metaphysics of the common man, as it is of the common natural scientist as well; and, in a suitably refined form, it is also the metaphysics of the reasonable metaphysician.42

Again, invoking Strawson here by no means qualifies as a resolution of the issue but it does offer a plausible characterisation of the affinity between Strawson’s explicit and Berlin’s mainly implicit position on the question of the realism/idealism debate and their contrast with Williams’ stand on the 42  Lewis Edwin Hahn ed., The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (1998: Open Court, Chicago, Ill), 196–7. It would seem that implicit in Strawson’s reply to Szubka is a two-level understanding of the realism/idealism debate: on one level there is our everyday, common sense acceptance of a mind-independent world and on another, more philosophically reflective level, is an understanding that our grasp of reality is unavoidably mind-dependent.

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matter. The key point is that Berlin does not share Williams’ preparedness to adopt an exclusively scientific model of objectivity since this is precisely the move that ends up threatening the epistemological status and claims of non-scientific forms of understanding and knowledge. One might argue that Williams treats the matter more tenaciously than Berlin because he believes we are obliged to consider it, that there is a non-optionality about contrasting the epistemological basis of science and ethics. Another way of stating this is that for Williams philosophical reflection about the grounds of science destroys the possibility of attributing objectivity (though, rather strangely, not knowledge) to ethics. In this vein, one might contend that Berlin’s position on the matter is at best evasive. But one could equally argue that Berlin disagrees with Williams for the reason that he, like Strawson, suspects that it leads us down a philosophical dead end, that it may ultimately be an idle question since our natural belief in the external world seems practically unchallengeable.43 Leaving things theoretically unexplored isn’t always a symptom of philosophical evasiveness or unrefinement. It can also have its source in a desire to be philosophically undogmatic so that we are not led to disregard or diminish other, more worldly-wise and humanly valuable ways of thinking and being. A consequence of Berlin’s internalist viewpoint is that demanding an all-or-­ nothing, overly strict metaphysical or epistemological dichotomy between viewing the world as made up of objects (e.g. mountains) that exist independently of us and objects (e.g. morals) whose existence is dependent on us is avoidable. A key part of the power of Berlin’s internalist philosophical outlook is that the conventionally framed distinctions between, for instance, science and ethics, or facts and values, or moral objectivity and moral conflict, lose their seductiveness and are replaced with a very different perspective that doesn’t so much deny that such distinctions have a certain, limited validity, but affirms that that they may be more optional and indeed more misleading than is commonly (and philosophically) believed. Berlin allows our thoughts about ethical values and common experience more room to breathe by resisting the line of enquiry that leads almost invariably to a view of ethical phenomena as having an inferior epistemological status compared with the methods and insights of science. For the reasons already given, this needn’t be perceived as an exercise in bad faith or circular thinking on Berlin’s part but rather a refusal to let a 43  See Quassim Cassam’s Foreword to P.  F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (2005 ed.: Routledge, London).

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certain type of detached and objectivist philosophical reflection triumph over a more internally-oriented, humanistic knowledge of ourselves and the world. Berlin reminds us that certain, well-trodden philosophical lines of enquiry are not as compelling as philosophers (even an uncomprisingly anti-theory philosopher like Williams) may think and that the space needed for a proper understanding of humankind requires us to resist embracing certain philosophical biases and avenues that will have the effect of diminishing the nature and status of our shared, if naturalistically suspect, knowledge. This point goes back to something I highlighted explicitly at the start of the book and which has been touched on throughout  this study, namely Berlin’s scepticism about the relevance and authority of much  philosophical reflections on humankind and his preparedness to challenge its claims if and when he thought they hinder rather than help our self-understanding. Berlin’s scepticism is of course vulnerable to all sorts of serious objections, not least the suspicion that he is groundlessly privileging his own intuitive biases at the cost of a certain kind of philosophical truth or that his own philosophical speculations can look decidedly flimsy and undeveloped in Williams’ more philosophically muscular and unforgiving company. And yet Berlin also gives us enough reason to suggest that his own philosophical outlook is more firmly  based than Williams’ on a proper understanding of the human world, that he was less prone than Williams to  falling into the ever-present  trap of letting the methods and standards of the natural sciences distort or diminish a truer appreciation of what Wilhelm Dilthey called ‘the social-historical reality’. Another area of difference between Berlin and Williams resides in their divergent views of the free will problem. Williams does not share Berlin’s libertarianism on the grounds that he sees it as flatly incompatible with what he knows of the natural world.44 But this should not imply that Williams is a compatibilist or, at least, not in the mainstream sense. Williams judges that the contemporary free will debate is as jaded as the one about the problem of evil. But he also thought the free will problem was profoundly misleading and in radical need to recasting.45 More specifically, 44  See, for example, Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (1995: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 19–20. 45  Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993: California University Press, Berkeley), 68. Not only did Williams’ views on the subject of free will evolve a good deal over his philosophical career but they are also scattered in various books and papers. The most revealing sources for his mature view of the matter are found in chapter 3 and 4 of Shame and Necessity and in the opening set of essays on the topic in Making Sense of Humanity. For an excellent discussion of Williams on free will, see Paul Russell, ‘Free Will and the Tragic Predicament:

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Williams wants to liberate our fundamentally correct naturalistic understanding of free will from the enduring distortions and fantasies of what he pejoratively refers to as ‘the morality system’, with its narrow and artificial preoccupation with and prioritisation of moral obligations and situate it in a more psychologically and ethically realistic account of moral responsibility. A key step in allowing this to happen, he argues, is to cease viewing the free will problem reductively as a debate between only two concerns, that is, determinism and moral responsibility. It is only by seeing the problem as a tripartite one composed of determinism, psychology (choice, decision and action) and ethics (blame, responsibility) that we have a chance of making sense of the phenomenon of freedom which he defines as consisting mainly in reconciling the demands of each of these three sets of items. He believes the reconciliation between determinism and psychology is relatively straightforward and that determinism should be interpreted psychophysically (our brain states) rather than in the traditional though obscure metaphysical sense of cause an effect.46 But he feels that the most challenging task is reconciling the first two items with our ethical outlook. And the reason for this is because all the work has to be done both in terms of divesting much of our contemporary ethical understanding of unrealistic moral components which distort our sense of agency and responsibility and in terms of the more positive enterprise of reimagining our ethical sense of ourselves more realistically and authentically: The will is as free as it needs to be. That does not mean, as libertarians would take it, that it is able to meet all the demands of the morality system, as they present themselves to the uncritical consciousness, or, perhaps, conscience. Nor does it mean that it is free enough to keep the morality system in adequate business, as reconcilers usually take it to mean. It means that we are considering merely our freedom as agents, and not the more important question of our political and social freedom, we have quite enough of it to lead a significant ethical life in truthful understanding of what that life involves. A truthful ethical life is, and always has been, one that can include our best understanding of our psychological life, and we know that such understanding is compatible with naturalistic explanation.47 Making Sense of Williams’, forthcoming in Andras Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), Agency, Fate & Luck: Themes from Bernard Williams. I would like to thank Paul Russell for sharing his paper in advance of its publication. 46  Bernard Williams, ‘Ethics’ in A. C. Grayling ed. Philosophy 1: A Guide through the Subject (1995: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 576. 47   ‘Bernard Williams, ‘How free does the will need to be?’ in Making Sense of Humanity, 19–20.

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It is an interesting question what Berlin thought (or might have thought) of Williams’ view of free will, of whether he would have considered it a step in the right direction. After all, Berlin ended his introduction to Four Essays on Liberty by stating that: But even here I am aware of how much more needs to be done, especially on the issue of free will, the solution of which seems to me to require a set of new conceptual tools, a break with traditional terminology, which no one, so far as I know, has yet been able to provide (L 54).

What we can say is that Williams’ attempt to address ‘the problem of free will’ fulfils one aspect of Berlin’s general criterion of progress by seeking to radically redefine our understanding of what the problem is and therefore what form progress might take. We shall now move on to discussing the matter of Berlin’s and Williams’ views of liberalism more directly.

From Pluralism to Liberalism and Back Again or Against Abstract Simplification The academic debate regarding the logical relation and compatibility of pluralism and liberalism has long been a distinctly jejune affair even if the cottage industry that keeps it alive is still bustling. Its sterility has a number of sources, not least the absurd assumption held by several of its leading lights, with varying degrees of explicitness, that the concepts of pluralism and liberalism should be interpreted as quasi-mathematical entities in which the logical rules of entailment and contradiction strictly apply. The negative version of the argument goes along the lines that since it cannot be proven that pluralism necessarily entails the prioritisation of liberalism then Berlin’s pluralist defence of liberalism is caught in a fatal inconsistency which leaves his political theory straightforwardly invalid. As we saw in Chap. 2, one need only ponder such logic-chopping sophistry for an instant to see how densely superfluous it is. Obeying or disobeying the rules of logic is not something that is decisively relevant to political and moral concepts and the concrete human ideals and realities they reflect. To demand that it is, or ought to be, is equivalent to postulating that numbers behave morally. Besides, as Berlin remarked, ‘logical objections are no good, in principle, against people’s beliefs about reality’.48 48  Unpublished letter to Philip Toynbee, 23 June 1969. Berlin and Williams give short shrift to such logic-chopping criticisms in their paper ‘Pluralism and Liberalism; a Reply’ in Political Studies 42 (1994), 306–9. The style and timing of this paper suggests that it was

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A less bizarre weakness of its narrow and abiding preoccupation with the reconcilability or otherwise of pluralism and liberalism is that such a concern is itself either too early or too late for its own good. Its belatedness lies in the fact that the historical association between pluralism and liberalism has, to a large extent, already happened—asking whether they are compatible is akin to investigating whether the decline of religion is consistent with the survival of society. Its prematurity, on the other hand, lies in the not unrelated fact that we have yet to reach a point of sufficient historical distance from where we might adjudicate their complex association with anything resembling objective disinterest. We are still too much in the thick of things to separate pluralism from liberalism to the extent that they can or should be separated. Another regrettable feature of this mainly frivolous academic debate centres on identifying which value or hyper-value connects pluralism and liberalism. Various candidates have been proferred, such as the sovereignty of moral autonomy, the sacredness of free choice, live and let live ethical subjectivism, and the de facto necessity of toleration. Each of these ideas is analysed in a contextual vacuum before being found wanting in some unredeemable way. Unsurprisingly, little of substance is advanced apart from the confirmation that it’s eminently possible to waste much time and mental effort on next to nothing. Berlin’s and Williams’ mode of political philosophy helps us to see that the question of the purely conceptual relation of pluralism and liberalism is largely an academic one in the pejorative sense—the world doesn’t need it. Indeed, they say as much in their brief reply to such logic-chopping theorists, remarking that they would be much better off focusing their attention on: the well-known and very important issues about the social and political stability of liberalism and of the outlooks historically associated with it.49

It is this more realistic and worthwhile project that Berlin took on when he delivered his celebrated inaugural lecture as the Chichele Professor in Social and Political Theory at Oxford. The most impressive feature of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is its success in engaging with the precarious and messy world of actual human affairs. The lecture has a palpable immediacy and realism that had been conspicuously absent from analytic political theory for most of the century: in fact the subject itself was famously written by Williams with the endorsement of Berlin. I critique the logic- chopping habits of Berlin’s critics in more detail in chapter 9 of The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin. 49  Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism; a Reply’ in Political Studies 42 (1994), 309.

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declared dead or, at least, moribund in 1956.50 Berlin was, of course, aware of the various rumours of its demise but treated them as absurd obituaries since they failed to show either that the subject’s core presuppositions had been repudiated or that new disciplines had effectively taken over the remit of political philosophy. For Berlin normative political philosophy, by which he means a form of enquiry that is principally focused on ‘the critical examination of presuppositions and assumptions, and the questioning of the order of priorities and ultimate ends’ (CC2 195), is feasible only ‘in a society in which there is no total acceptance of any single end’ (CC2!96). The reason is twofold. In the first place, a society that believes it has found the one true idea of the good life, such as national glory, obedience to the divine will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, will, roughly speaking, be concerned only with working out the most efficient means to achieving the universally sanctioned end. In short, there is no need to debate the various and competing ends of life if we are all agreed on what the supreme, monistic end is or should be. Secondly, it is only in a society in which there is room for a variety of competing moral values and human ideals to breathe, that political philosophy enjoys a genuine raison d’être. This is where Berlin’s metaethical pluralism asserts itself. It is not merely that his pluralism grounds his conception of the nature and purpose of evaluative political theory. It is also at the very heart of his principled as well as pragmatic defence of a liberal, tolerant society. In Berlin’s hands the relationship between pluralism and liberalism is far more analogous to an elective affinity than anything that could described as a conceptually necessary relation. Let me briefly unpack the bones of his pluralistic justification of political theory and liberalism. We have noted in the preceding pages of this book various aspects of Berlin’s pluralism. These include his notion that there is no uniquely right 50  Peter Laslett, introduction in his edited volume Philosophy, Politics and Society, First series (1956: Basil Blackwell, Oxford), vii. Laslett’s verdict regarding the death of political theory was announced with an air of cool detachment. Moreover, the collection of essays he assembled did nothing to reassure T. E. Utley in his extended review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (8 June, 1956) that political theory was about to enjoy a Lazarus-like reappearance. Indeed Utley bemoaned the parlous state of political thought, stating that the public deserved something better than the extremes of ‘the flabby-minded exponents of vaguely edifying ideas’ exemplified by the likes of John Bowle and the etiolated and frivolous writings of academic practitioners such as T. D. Weldon, Margaret MacDonald and Anthony Quinton, who had let political theory deteriorate to ‘the modest art of verbal juggling’.

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answer to a truly philosophical question (even if there are definitely better and worse answers), the belief that moral diversity and disagreement pervade our lives because of the ineliminable heterogeneity of and conflict between our ethical values and ideals of the good life, and the historicist or contextualist insight that the appeal or even option of certain human ends and visions of the good and the underlying frames of reference upon which they depend come and go and get replaced by new ones or, at least, modern variations of their earlier manifestations. There is also the more subtle feature of historicism which has to do with the contingent fact that modernity is peculiarly sensitive to, if not always accommodating of, different moral beliefs and ways of living. These various streams of pluralism and historicism converge to inform Berlin’s conviction that political theory only makes positive sense in a pluralist society, one in which it is considered necessary and legitimate to think about: such questions as what is specifically human and what is not, and why; whether specific categories, say those of purpose or of belonging to a group or of law, are indispensable to understanding what men are; and so, inevitably, with the source, scope and validity of certain human goals.(CC2 205) And, crucially, if this is the task of politically theory, then it cannot, from the very nature of its interests, avoid evaluation; it is thoroughly committed not only to the analysis of, but to conclusions about the validity of, ideas of the good and the bad, the permitted and the forbidden, the harmonious and the discordant which any discussion of liberty or justice or authority or political morality is sooner or later bound to encounter. These central conceptions, moral, political, aesthetic, have altered as the all-inclusive metaphysical models in which they are an essential element have themselves altered. Any change in the central model is a change in the ways in which the data of experience are perceived and interpreted. The degree to which such categories are shot through with evaluation will doubtless depend on their direct connection with human desires and interests. Statements about physical nature can achieve neutrality in this respect; this is more difficult when the data are those of history, and nearly impossible in the case of moral and social life, where the words themselves are inescapably charged with ethical or aesthetic or political content. (CC2 206)

And this, in turn, helps to explain why to suppose that:

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there have been or could be ages without political philosophy is like supposing that, as there are ages of faith, so there could be ages of total disbelief. But this is an absurd notion: there is no human activity without some general outlook. (CC2 206)

In a politically repressive or totalitarian society, it is very difficult and dangerous to engage in the kind of free, sceptical and frequently unsettling form of enquiry that defines authentic political philosophy. Either such closed societies believe that they have already found the truth and therefore have no need to debate it any further or, more commonly, they have no regard for such things as truth and justice and are explicitly and unapologetically serving the interests of the regime. Individual members of such societies may, of course, continue to engage in insubordinate activity in the interests of freedom of speech or basic human decency, truth to power or whatever the cause, but, typically, they do so at great personal peril while the conscience and imagination of less courageous souls gradually atrophy (assuming there was something to atrophy in first place). One wonders, for example, who took notice of Tacitus’ redolent line about the Roman conquest of Britain in Agricola, a line made all the more unforgettable by having an enemy of Rome utter it: Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (Where they make a desert, they call it peace).51 This does not mean, of course, that there is a necessary correlation between philosophy and freedom or, alternatively, between some form of quietism and repressive despotism. The history of humanity is too complex to encourage such neat and sweeping generalisations. However, as Berlin states in his essay ‘Philosophy and Government Repression’: Certainly no society will be wholly secure, wholly safe on rocklike foundations, while philosophers are allowed to roam at large. But their suppression will kill liberty too. That is why all the enemies of freedom, like the Communists and Fascists, automatically round upon intellectuals and make them their first victims; rightly, for they are the great disseminators of those critical ideas which as a rule the great philosophers are the first to formulate. All others may be brought into conformity with the new despotism; only they, whether they want to or not, are in principle incapable of being assimilated into it. This is glory enough for any human activity. (SR2 95) 51  Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola and Germany trans. by A. R. Birley (1999: Oxford World Classics, Oxford), 22.

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This brings us to the connection between pluralism and liberalism. It is not of course an exclusively conceptual connection created and maintained from an armchair of some sententious Oxford don. Their association is far more attributable to the happenstance of history than it is to the unworldly reflections of any academic philosopher(s). Berlin’s political philosophy distinguishes itself by registering the deeper dialectic between words and deeds (or ideas and reality) and then reversing the default understanding of the world of human affairs by making theory more accountable to the contingencies of concrete social context rather than the other way around. This bold move means that a sense of history and realism rather than the hollow dictates of systematic theory come to occupy the centre ground. The rich possibilities that open up from adopting such an approach are, yet again, forcefully expressed in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. What is pertinent about that essay, for our discussion, hinges on why Berlin thinks that the distinction between two notions of political freedom, that is negative and positive liberty, is so important. He doesn’t suppose its significance lies primarily in the conceptual difference between ‘the freedom which consists in being one’s own master [i.e. positive liberty] and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men [i.e. negative liberty]’ (L 178). Rather the distinction gets its chief meaning and importance from its relevance to human beings in the cut and thrust of their actual lived lives. In a pluralistic universe in which people have genuine choices to make about what way of life they wish to pursue, the freedom to exercise that choice free from external constraints or prohibitions, is crucial (and the fact that many of us may take this right for granted does not vitiate its value). Moreover, if, as pluralism claims, human values and ideals are inherently different and in irreducible conflict, and if reason cannot determine a uniquely right solution to moral disagreement, let alone a single best way of life, then it would appear there exists a principled rather than merely pragmatic defence of liberalism. We don’t have to regard toleration as the world-­ weary child of an imperfect world but can now view it as a morally gripping and politically appropriate response to an inescapable and cherished feature of modern life. The right to be free to choose our own individual destiny or destinies gains a vital source of political legitimacy from the truth and not merely the sociological fact of value pluralism. It is worth emphasising that the relevance of Berlin’s pluralist defence of liberalism is

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not restricted to the democracies of the Western world. The universal reach and resonance of his work is captured in the acute and moving tribute paid to him by his fellow countryman, the Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky’s essay, which was published after he met Berlin for the first time in London in 1972, expresses what Berlin and his ideas meant to him from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain: To me, his words always were a cry from the bowels of the monster, a call not so much for help as of help. – a normal response of the mind singed and scarred by the present, and wishing it upon nobody as the future […]. an autonomous mind in the grip of an outward gravity, whose pull extends its perspective on this life insofar as this mind cares to send back signals… Short of being able to alter it [Soviet Russia], he helps one to endure it.52

The relative importance that Berlin attributes to negative liberty should not imply that he is an opponent of positive liberty or that he thinks it is an unimportant political value. On the contrary, he regards positive liberty as a vital element of our modern understanding of freedom and one which responds to enduring needs of individuals and society.53 His issue with positive liberty is experiential and historical rather than strictly conceptual. One of the more salient lessons of modern history, and especially of the last century, is, Berlin argues, just how catastrophically the ideal of positive liberty is vulnerable to or exploitable by the worst types of political oppression and totalitarianism. History has demonstrated how brief the step can be from a desire for self-realisation to the sense of having discovered a real or rational self, ending in the embrace of oppressive forms of despotism. One of the principal factors that has caused such a deformation over the past two hundred years is the immensely influential assumption that 52  Joseph Brodsky, ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Tribute’ was first published as ‘Isaiah Berlin at Eighty’ in the New York Review of Books, 17 August 1989 and, shortly afterwards, republished in Edna and Avishai Margalit eds., Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (1991: Hogarth Press, London), 205–14. 53  There are a number of common and enduring myths about Berlin’s treatment of freedom in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. All of the following claims about his essay are straightforwardly untrue and should not survive even the most cursory reading of the text: negative liberty is the same as or reducible to personal autonomy or freedom of choice or psychological freedom; negative liberty enjoys absolute priority above all other moral and political values; no other values can ever trump individual freedom; positive liberty is inherently incoherent and dangerous; pluralism logically entails liberalism; value pluralism is a species of ethical relativism or subjectivism.

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harmony among ethical and social values is not merely desirable but possible. So, for example, if I know in my heart of hearts or by the light of unaided reason that my true self is a manifestation of what my political party or my nation or humanity as a whole can or should be, the historical record has shown that it can be an unnervingly short step before we find ‘the wise’ or ‘the party leaders’ or ‘the chosen few’ having to coerce the rest of us to be free to bring about ‘the radiant tomorrow’.54 Dire experience has shown how potent this urge can be when it is fuelled by the persistent and still influential belief that the genuine goals of all rational human beings must fit into a single, universal and all-embracing pattern, a kind of cosmic jigsaw where everything, or at least everything objectively worthwhile, eventually finds its natural, pre-ordained place and fits without remainder. In contrast: Pluralism, with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty that it entails is …truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.[...] It is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings. In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and

54  The overrated and over-indulged Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was among the intellectuals who stayed true to the vile conviction that the lives of ordinary people could be justifiably sacrificed for the sake of what he was fond of calling ‘the radiant tomorrow’. It never seemed to occur to Hobsbawm that he would be among those singled out for immediate arrest and extermination in the first ‘radiant’ days of a totalitarian dictatorship. The words of Alexander Herzen offer a fitting riposte to the deadly nonsense of Hobsbawm and his fellow travellers:

Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes, shouting “morituri te salutant”, can only give the […] mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on’ From the other Shore (1848–50)

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thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human. (L 216–17)

But then, how, you might ask, does a genuinely liberal state respond to the irreconcilable demands and commitments of different moral and political ideals and, more fundamentally, of rival conceptions of the human good? One could do worse than refer to the answer that Berlin gave in the closing paragraph of his late essay ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’ Of course social and political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes that unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair – that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behaviour, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made? Yet if there is some truth to this view, perhaps that is sufficient. An eminent American philosopher of our day once said that there is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth when it is discovered will necessarily prove interesting. It may be enough that it is truth, or even an approximation to it; consequently I do not feel apologetic for advancing this. Truth, said Tolstoy, ‘has been, is and will be beautiful’. I do not know if this is so in the realm of ethics, but it seems to me near enough to what most of us wish to believe not to be too lightly set aside. (CTH2 20)

Berlin’s emphasis on the maintenance of an ‘uneasy equilibrium’ and the need for concession and compromise within the broadly defined bounds of human decency and even-handedness has not proved particularly compelling to academic political theorists. As we saw in Chap. 2, the most common objection is some variation of the complaint that Berlin’s ‘solution’ to the situation of moral and political conflict illicitly privileges liberal freedom at the cost of other equally legitimate and competing human ideals and priorities. Of all the objections to Berlin’s pluralist defence of liberalism, many of which are legitimate and cogent, the still prevailing one that it ends up contradicting itself remains unpersuasive and has become jaded.55 To claim that it is possible to produce a justification of 55  Among the more powerful objections to Berlin’s liberalism is that it sets up an excessively negative opposition between the individual and the state, the personal and the political, and then consistently favours the former at the expense of the latter. The lessons of history, especially of the twentieth century, may well give us reason to be wary of the state and its

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liberalism that somehow escapes the necessity for compromise while guaranteeing some minimum level of negative liberty is, to put it mildly, remarkably optimistic. Berlin gives us good reasons for supposing that such optimism is always  delusional. As he observes at the end of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (L 217)

The realisation that the world of human affairs is entirely contingent should make us deeply sceptical of any moral and political philosophy that presupposes or promises the perfectibility of humankind, especially one that assumes that such a utopian dream can be generated by some grandiose theoretical system. There are fewer more informed and sophisticated sceptical voices to rival that of Berlin’s liberal realism than that of Bernard Williams. Williams shared Berlin’s acceptance of the untidy reality of our pluralistic world as well as his rejection of all forms of moral and political monism. But he also gave the realism of  Berlin’s pluralistic liberalism a more rigorous and sophisticated philosophical and historicist twist, one that sought to  salvage  a credible confidence in liberalism  following the recognition of its historicity. I shall conclude this sub-chapter by saying powers, but it is questionable how decisive and persistent that reason should be. The spirit and intensity of Berlin’s defence of negative liberty can obscure the case for the indispensability of politics both as the source and guarantor of our rights and liberties and as the only feasible form of effective collective action to respond to many of the existential challenges facing society and, more positively, to proactively improve the quality of people’s lives through, for example, the provision of a welfare state.

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something about each of these distinct and related features of Williams’ political theory. There are many interesting things that could be said about Williams’ grown-up, if highly astringent, scepticism regarding the value of theory in ethics and politics. There are also multiple ways of entering the rather unsettling, if unfailingly insightful, world of Williams’ radical pessimism, especially in relation to the assumptions and hopes of conventional analytic moral and political theory.56 One approach is conveniently provided by Williams himself in the Isaiah Berlin Lecture he gave in 1994 under the title ‘The Liberalism of Fear’.57 Williams begins that lecture in a typically irreverent manner by recalling a conversation he had with another philosopher (Michael Stocker) in which they agreed that ‘our work consisted largely of reminding moral philosophers of truths about human life which are very well known to virtually all adult human beings except moral philosophers’, not least, that, ‘it’s all a mess’.58 This prompts Williams to consider the disarming question of who is the intended audience of contemporary political philosophy and what authority such philosophical reflections about politics is thought to have. What’s interesting about this question is its refreshing lack of theoretical presumptuousness. Most analytic political theorists start rather mechanically, taking, at least, two or three unearned steps ahead of themselves and rarely asking, let alone exploring, not just what’s the point of their enquiry but, more basically, what leads them to suppose it could or should have a point.59 Williams 56  One particularly fertile way that I don’t explore here is to study Williams’ political theory through a Thucydidian lens. Raymond Geuss has already done this to illuminating effect in his essay, ‘Thucydides, Nietzsche and Williams’ in his Outside Ethics (2005: Princeton University Press, New Jersey), 219–33. 57  Bernard Williams ‘The Liberalism of Fear’ in his In The Beginning Was The Deed (2005: Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey), 52–61. Williams’ explicitly acknowledges that the title of his lecture comes from a phrase coined by the Latvian-born scholar Judith Shklar; see Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’ in Nancy Rosenblum ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (1989: Harvard University press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), 21–38. Williams had indicated his admiration of Shklar’s approach to political understanding twenty years earlier in his largely positive review of her book Ordinary Vices in The London Review of Books Vol. 9, No.10, 6 June 1985. 58  Ibidem, 52. 59  Not all social and political philosophers conform to the introverted and deadening mode of professional academic discourse. Two notable and admirable exceptions include Albert Hirschman and Raymond Guess. See, in particular, Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991: Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

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thinks that working out the point of political philosophy is more straightforward than it is for moral theory. One way of working out its purpose, is to consider who might profit from reading it apart from academic philosophers who already have a professional interest in such writings. Williams leaves it deliberately vague which contemporary works of political philosophy would survive such a test—his silence is both telling and damning. He argues that the two most obvious audiences are the powerful and the rest of us. He thinks that Judith Shklar’s writings and, in particular, her essay, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, pass the test, especially for the relatively powerless members of liberal society. The success of her paper is partly attributable, Williams argues, to what it is not; it is neither a species of ‘the liberalism of natural rights’ nor of ‘the liberalism of personal development’. The liberalism of fear does not share the moral abstractions and relentless wistfulness of mainstream liberal political theory. Nor does it think that the best way to defend liberalism is by appealing monistically to such principles as liberty, equality or the neutrality of the state. More positively, Shklar’s liberalism, like Berlin’s, takes its bearing from what the world happens to be rather than from what we might ideally like it to be; their understanding of the importance of making sense of politics is rooted in their shared experience of fleeing their motherland in Latvia as a result of the mortal dangers posed by politics and anti-Semitism. But where Berlin grounds his liberalism on a pluralistic rejection of the notion of a single human ideal or summum bonum, Shklar bases her liberal theory on the priority of protecting society from what she defines as the summum malum, namely, state cruelty and the systematic fear it engenders among the citizenry.60 For Shklar politics is or should be about avoiding cruelty Massachusetts) and Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (2008: Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey). 60  Shklar defines cruelty as ‘the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter.’. She goes on to say that ‘A minimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an end of public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.’ Ibidem, 29. It is worth noting that Shklar felt that Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty and, more specifically, his idea that these concepts were more in conflict with each other than not, did not hold the same truth and relevance for American society and politics as they may have had for twentieth-century Europe. She articulates her view of the major shortcomings of Berlin’s liberalism in her paper ‘Negative Liberty, Positive Liberty in the United States’ in

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rather than pursuing the good. Both accounts of liberalism are non-­ utopian, realistic and historically informed, but they have different nuances and emphases. Shklar is preoccupied with the need to prioritise the preconditions of liberalism, primarily by limiting the power of the state, which serve to protect negative liberty, whereas Berlin is more focused on the scope rather than the source of negative liberty and the extent to which a state can be genuinely tolerant of individual variety and moral diversity. It could be argued that Shklar’s version of liberalism has become more relevant in our currently precarious situation. Contemporary liberal societies are facing the very real threat of eclipse in what were until recently considered its strongholds in Western Europe and the United States, and the very things that Shklar identified as liberalism’s greatest vulnerabilities are being exploited to the full by internal as much as external foes. But we should not overstate the differences between Shklar and Berlin, since what they have in common is far more important than what differentiates them. They share a deep opposition to all forms of utopianism (including liberal perfectionism), an avowal that the lessons of history are far more pertinent and powerful than the abstract insights of stridently rationalistic and Judith Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson eds, (1998: Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL), 112–26. Another point worth emphasising in this context is whether liberalism is better off basing itself ultimately on a rejection of cruelty or on a commitment to truth. On one level, this can seem like an academic question since a commitment to truth and objectivity might be thought to entail a repudiation of terror and cruelty and vice-versa. But, as James Conant shows in an excellent essay on Richard Rorty’s interpretation of Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, there is a very real and consequential difference between rooting one’s loyalty to liberalism in a hatred of cruelty rather than a devotion to truth. As he states: Orwell thinks that one of the consequences of totalitarianism is that it undermines the possibility of your leading a life in which you are free to undermine the possibility of your leading a life in which you are free to think your own thoughts. Another of its consequences, he thinks, is that it leads to the proliferation of cruelty. But neither of these is what he calls the “really frightening thing about totalitarianism” – they are rather, in his view, merely consequences of it. “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism,” Orwell says, “is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth.” See James Conant ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’ in Robert Brandom ed., Rorty and His Critics (2000: Blackwell, Oxford), 295. The quote from Orwell is from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol.3. 1943–1945, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus eds. (1970: Penguin, London), ‘As I Please’, February 4, 1944, 110.

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universalistic political theory, a recognition that the state may be a necessary evil but that the liberal state is by far the least bad option, and a conviction that a moderate and sceptical liberalism is the natural friend and reliable protector of the ruled rather than the rulers.61 As Berlin remarks in ‘The Three Stands of My Life’: Not to trample on other people, however difficult they are, is not everything; but it is a very, very great deal. (PI3 438)

Of course, neither version of liberalism is without its shortcomings and one that is common to both is what they leave out. The importance of this deficiency is not to be underestimated, especially in a world in which nation states are less and less in control of their own destinies and more accountable international organisations such as the UN are increasingly impotent. The agents of global capitalism now hold the reins of power and their more avaricious and suicidal tendencies are allowed free, unfettered play. It has by now become a virtual bromide that we have found ourselves in a situation where we would sooner ponder the end of the world than consider the end of capitalism. The mess has become significantly greater since Berlin, Williams and Shklar left the world’s stage and humanity’s will to self-destructiveness more widespread and irreversible. But none of this renders their political realism irrelevant. Quite the opposite. They remind us that the rise of liberal toleration was as contingently non-inevitable as its annihilation is entirely possible, perhaps even probable. We might like to entertain Hegel’s idea that history is the story of liberty becoming increasingly conscious of itself but there was nothing ineluctable about liberalism’s emergence and there is no guarantee about its future survival. There were good and gentle souls before the birth of liberal humanism and no doubt others will be found in a post-liberal epoch, whatever that ends up being. But it is hard not to think that the demise of liberalism would exert irresistible pressure on the survival of our basically open, humane and free civilisation, of the institutions and norms that protect toleration and the rule of law, our rights to free speech, association and other civil liberties, and of a vestigial faith in the value of truth and 61  See Edward Hall’s Value, Conflict and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams and the Realist Revival in Political Theory (2020: Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL) which makes a persuasive case for the claim that all three thinkers make a positive rather than merely a critical or cautionary contribution to liberal political theory.

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truthfulness in the public sphere. Historically and normatively, liberalism’s relationship with democracy has been a complex and occasionally strained one but their continued co-existence would appear to have become more mutually and urgently interdependent than ever. The biggest mistake we can make is to assume that some deus ex machina will keep liberalism’s affirming flame lit for us. Only we ourselves can perform that crucial task and only time will tell if we are prepared to take it on. It may well be that the best way for liberalism to defend itself is to rely less on extolling its own virtues and more on discrediting the extreme beliefs and dogmatic practices of its opponents. Moreover, invoking the truth of pluralism offers a more cogent way of opposing illiberal zealotry than naively believing that appealing to the primacy of such liberal doctrines as moral neutrality or personal freedom will be sufficient to win over the hearts and minds of dogmatists. This helps explain why Berlin consistently appealed to truth and knowledge as the principal and ultimate source of his defence of a tolerant society, not because truth and liberalism add up to the same thing but because liberalism makes room for truth: If there is to be any hope of a rational order on earth, or of a just appreciation of the many various interests that divide diverse groups of human beings  – knowledge that is indispensable to any attempt to assess their effects, and the patterns of their interplay and its consequences, in order to find viable compromises through which men continue to live and satisfy their desires without thereby crushing the equally central desires of others – it lies in the bringing to light of these models, social, moral, political, and above all the underlying metaphysical patterns in which they are rooted, with a view to examining whether they are adequate to their task. (CC2 13)

The other feature of Berlin’s liberalism of which Williams deepens our understanding centres on the implications of an awareness of and immersion in our historicism. Again, there is no shortage of places to refer to this topic in Williams’ writings but there are few more telling than his reply to Joseph Raz’s 2001 Tanner Lecture.62 The substance of Raz’s lecture on ‘The Practice of Value’ need not concern us here since the relevant section of Williams’ commentary is sufficiently self-standing. The key point that Williams makes comes just after he highlights the rather straightforward, if frequently neglected, point that ‘value pluralism is a thesis about values, 62  Bernard Williams, ‘Relativism, History and the Existence of Values’ in Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value (2003: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 106–18.

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not itself a political or ethical ideal’.63 A large part of the significance of this fact, he argues, is that we cannot credibly recruit value pluralism in any kind of clinchingly vindicatory way as a justification for liberalism. To do so would commit us either to believing along Aristotelian lines that pluralistic liberalism uniquely expresses or enables a morally vital aspect of human nature or, alternatively, pinning our colours to some version of Hegelianism which claims that liberalism represents the latest and final flowering of human history. Neither of these alternatives amounts to what Williams refers to in his earlier work Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy as ‘real options’.64 He then states: The question whether self-conscious and critical societies are a higher expression of human nature (period) may be unintelligible – messages sent to the Aristotelian essence centre are, as always, returned unopened to the sender. But we have such a society, and we have values associated with that, and there is no road back. I do not mean that there could be no historical process that could lead back – that is certainly false. I mean that we could not consistently set out to go back, not only because of the specific values we have in our present condition, but also because forcing people to go back or trying to do so would involve something not involved in merely being back: massive coercion, which offends against many other and highly general values.’65

This may strike us as thin, if undeluded, gruel. However, there is a very real possibility that Williams’ austere diagnosis of what’s available to us to affirm liberalism is both true and truthful. The hard-headed humility of its claims makes it all the  more serious and  convincing. There is reason to believe that Berlin would have concurred with it. And yet what has come to pass since Williams wrote the above is the chilling ease in which liberalism and the way of life we have come to associate with it have been gravely and perhaps irretrievably undermined by forces that have not yet had to resort to ‘massive coercion’ to achieve their profoundly illiberal and 63  Ibidem, 117. Williams could have been more specific here: value pluralism is not a normative political or ethical ideal but it is a metaethical thesis and therefore not value-neutral. In my book, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury), I try to show how the historical and evaluative elements of Berlin’s metaethical value pluralism supports his defence of liberalism. 64  See chapter 9 of Ethics and Limits of Philosophy for Williams’ distinction between real and notional options and confrontations. 65  ‘Relativism, History and the Existence of Values’, 117.

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sinister ends. Things have deteriorated greatly since Berlin felt he could retain hope in the feasibility of ‘a world which is a reasonably peaceful coat of many colours, each portion of which develops its own distinct cultural identity and is tolerant of others.’66 Perhaps the real monsters brought forth by our latest sleep of reason are not so much the usual suspects of evil dictators and their willing executioners but our own inexcusable moral cowardice and political complacency. As Leszek Kolakowski, a thinker who had first-hand experience of living under a repressive regime, stated: ‘In politics, being deceived is no excuse.’67 It remains to be seen if liberalism and, more broadly, what many of us have come to regard as a decent, open and civilised society can fight back. Much has been made in recent years about the parallels between our time and the 1930s. And we know how that ‘low, dishonest decade’ ended. In 1935 Berlin submitted an article to the London Mercury, one of the very few that he produced on his own initiative. The magazine editor expressed misgivings about the piece and asked Berlin to make changes. Berlin declined to do so. His editor, Henry Hardy, relates that Berlin ‘did not forget the piece, and from time to time referred to this wounding episode, until the end of his life.’ The article, under the title, ‘A sense of impending doom’, was published for the first time in 2001  in the Times Literary Supplement. The following excerpt offers a fitting note on which to close this chapter: The only figures of size who are moving in any common and definite direction are those of Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. They must by now be tired and resentful of the fact that they are invariably discussed together or judged collectively: but it is nevertheless true that in such matters public opinion makes few mistakes; nor is this one, for they form a genuine movement…. Their sense of approaching disaster is as vivid as that of the Russian [Alexander Blok]: they are as conscious as he that in the sultry period which immediately precedes a revolution it is impossible to go on working in the private world, shutting out all intimations of the storm, in order, as it would be said, to preserve their integrity, their personal attitude; in order to deal with purely artistic problems…. These poets write always with one eye on 66  Nathan Gardel, ‘Two Concepts of Nationalism: an interview with Isaiah Berlin’, New York Review of Books, 21 November 1991. 67  Quoted in Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017: Bodley Head, London), book’s epigraph. Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) was a Polish émigré, philosopher and Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

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the bomb, waiting for it to burst: until this happens they will have no peace, everything they write will have it, or the fear of it, or the expectation of it, as its central point of reference, the factor by which their behaviour is determined. Will it go off or won’t it? Will there or will there not be a social revolution? Somehow, we must come to terms with the masses, must identify ourselves with their demands and sufferings and ultimate destiny, which daily grows bigger in the world in which artists live and work…. They tell the truth about their experience of the present, just as it comes, and about their insight into the immediate future, which poets, being more sensitive to change, seem to discern much more accurately than specialists absorbed each in his subject; tell the truth immediately, before it cools, before the scene changes completely or the world tumbled about their ears, and therefore in great haste and incompletely.68

68  ‘A Sense of Impending Doom’ in the Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 2001, 11–2. The article is available under the title ‘Literature and the Crisis’ on the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

I never don’t moralize. Isaiah Berlin Letter to Mary Fisher, 18 April 1940 (F 299)

Berlin was fond of saying that philosophical questions are childlike.1 Most people stop asking such questions when they grow up, but philosophers don’t. Those of us who keep asking them find ourselves falling into one of two camps: those who see philosophy as an intrinsic part of everyday life and those who see it as largely removed from normal experience. Thinkers who see philosophy as continuous with the stream of lived human life are usually keen not to see connections severed between our basic intuitions and our more reflectively disinterested views. Moreover, 1

 See, for example, his essay on J. L. Austin where he recalls a conversation in which he says: Supposing a child were to express a wish to meet Napoleon as he was at the battle of Austerlitz, […]. What, I asked Austin, should one say to the child? Simply that it has confused the material and formal modes, so to speak?’ Austin replied: ‘Do not speak so. Tell the child to try and go back into the past. Tell it there is no law against it. Let it try. Let it try, and see what happens then.’ It seems to me now, as it seemed to me before the last war, that Austin understood the nature of philosophy…understood, better than most, what philosophy was. (PI3 174)

There is sense here in which the philosophical impulse is child-like rather than childish.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6_7

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when divergences or contradictions emerge between our intuitions and our more objective outlook, they find it difficult to abandon the former for the latter. This tends to be particularly the case when there is a tension between scientific and humanistic perspectives in which the latter is more aligned with our common, pre-theoretical beliefs and practices. It is not that they are anti-scientific or indeed that they are unprepared to adjust their intuitions in the light of scientific discoveries or rational argument but that they are convinced that a more human-minded, internalist outlook has its own integrity and value which cannot be jettisoned or denied without a deep and perhaps unendurable sense of loss. Those who are more inclined to conceive philosophy in fundamentally scientific or naturalistic terms tend to be uncomfortable with conceding that philosophy has much, if anything, to do with daily life. They are keener to keep philosophy as pure and insulated as possible from the demands of ordinary life which are prone to making philosophy something it isn’t. Ayer is a philosopher who clearly falls into this category. Berlin discussed this exact aspect of philosophy’s relation to our existential lives with Ayer during a stroll in Christ Church Meadows in Oxford in the early 1930s and recalls his friend’s remark: ‘There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis—about the meaning of what we say—and there is all this—an excited sweep of his hands—all of life.’2 Philosophers in Ayer’s mould are adamant that philosophy is essentially an abstract, largely scientific subject that is fundamentally separate from the everyday world of human affairs. They suspect that making it continuous with ordinary life leads us down a slippery slope which in turn renders it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish philosophy from more refined forms of popular psychology or moralistic sermonising. But where does this leave us? Must we accept the seemingly inevitable but unsatisfying conclusion that there exists a plurality of different and incommensurable meta-philosophies, and that whatever conception of philosophy we adopt, whatever world view we may end up promulgating, is ultimately a subjective and temperamental affair? There is, I suggest, a less forlorn way of responding to this question that also holds out the possibility of disclosing more about philosophy itself rather than being left with the unfruitful task of speculating about the erratic and often unconscious interplay between the particular dispositions of philosophers and their specific philosophical outlooks and beliefs. 2

 Quoted Ben Rogers, A J. Ayer: A Life (1999: Chatto & Windus, London), 2.

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A Faustian Choice? Our starting point is the following typically provocative question for philosophers put forward by Daniel Dennett3: If Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, asks Dennett, which would you choose? A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history) B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come Dennett claims that most philosophers ‘reluctantly admit’ that they would choose Option B on the grounds that they would ‘rather be read than be right’. In contrast, scientists, we are told, tend to go unhesitatingly for Option A and are dumbfounded that most philosophers would choose Option B, not appreciating perhaps that if all philosophy’s supposedly unanswerable questions were solved then there would be nothing left for philosophers to do.4 Dennett goes on to consider briefly what these contrasting reactions tell us about the difference between science and philosophy. He makes two plausible points. On the one hand, there seems to be something irreducibly idiosyncratic about philosophical theories (in much the same way that there is something inescapably sui generis about the pen that produced Hamlet) in a way that doesn’t seem to apply to scientific discoveries. On the other, the perceived different between science and philosophy (and how philosophers and scientists typically respond to the above question) isn’t as pronounced as scientists (and philosophers) may think when they reflect on, for example, Descartes’ work on physics or Chomsky’s breakthrough in linguistics, and their subsequent influence, which suggests that the choice between being first and right and being 3  Daniel C.  Dennett, Intuition Pumps and other tools for thinking (2013: Allen Lane, London), 411–3. 4  The options offered by Dennett are hardly exhaustive and reflect the rather narrow vision of much analytic philosophy. Another option worth considering, for example, is one put forward by Heidegger, who suggests that we give up trying to reach a final, unimprovable account of the world or, alternatively, going around in virtual circles endlessly pondering unanswerable questions and look at philosophy, and, indeed life, through a phenomenological lens in which the former lose their significance and a new set of preoccupations and questions take centre stage.

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original and provocative is not so clear-cut. Dennett’s analysis suggests that the criteria of success in philosophy are more various than would appear to be the case in science: being true is vital to philosophy but so are other factors such as whether an idea is interesting, provocative, original, affecting or readable. But even then, one has only to read the works of such scientists as Peter Medawar or Lewis Thomas or, more recently, Carlo Rovelli, to appreciate that the differences between science and the humanities are not nearly so great as they are alleged to be.5 But my particular  interest in Dennett’s Faustian-type bargain takes a different path. For what seems to be most impressive about the choice he presents is what it suggests about the philosophical enterprise itself. While scientists may find it more  straightforward to choose Option A over Option B, philosophers are left with serious qualms about having to plump one way or the other. And the reason is not hard to find: the two options reflect two sides of the same philosophical coin. If a philosopher chooses Option A over Option B then he seems committed to rejecting a seemingly sacrosanct feature of philosophy, the claim that its problems elude conclusive solutions, whereas if he chooses Option B over Option A then he appears to be aligned with abandoning philosophy’s commitment to discovering the truth. The main problem with this Faustian pact is its suggestion that the distinction between being original and being right in philosophy is a difference of kind rather than of degree. There has been no shortage of philosophers, of course, who have favoured the demand for truth over the demand for originality. Nor has there been an absence of thinkers who have claimed that philosophy’s real goal is one of edification rather than a dispassionate quest for final truths. The mistake they all make is to deny the basic and proper tension that lies at the heart of the subject itself. Philosophy may be committed to the truth, which in turn fuels its desire for an objective view of the world, but it is also an inherently humanistic subject that finds it peculiarly difficult to stay faithful to a worldview that denies or diminishes our own non-trivial and inescapable subjectivity of thought. Dennett’s choice reveals something of the imprint of the eighteenth-century thinker, G. E. Lessing’s memorable observation:

5  See, for instance, Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic (1982: Oxford University Press, Oxford) and Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1980: The Viking Press, New York).

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If God held truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving for truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me “Choose”, with humility I would pick on the left hand and say “Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for thee alone.”6

Implicit in Dennett choice is the suggestion that absolute and unimprovable truth is achievable which it isn’t. The choices and dilemmas we make only happen within the world of our ‘everlasting striving for truth’ which can never be infallible or free of mistakes but which nonetheless remains an objectively valid and indispensable human quest. The meta-philosophies of Berlin and his interlocutors reveal, to a greater or lesser extent, philosophy’s inherent tensions and limitations. Ayer’s famous admission toward the end of his career that the main defect of logical positivism is that ‘nearly all of it was false’; Austin’s acknowledgement that linguistic phenomenology constitutes a necessary but hardly a sufficient method for tackling philosophy’s problems; Strawson’s emphasis on the extra-scientific heart of philosophy which has a sharp inexactness and open-endedness; Skinner’s problematic commitment to the pastness of the past while affirming the contemporary pertinence of history’s buried intellectual treasures; the tensions between Williams’ robustly absolute conception of the world and his view of philosophy as a humanistic discipline; and, finally, Berlin’s unremitting ambivalence about the intellectual virtues and vices of Enlightenment and Counter-­ Enlightenment ideas—all provide telling illustrations of their fidelity to the conflicting motivations and conceptions of philosophical reflection. They also help to show why the contributions of Berlin to philosophy amount to news that stays news. They are without exception authentic and gifted philosophers who bear witness to the truth that philosophy tends to reveal some of its most telling insights when it has the courage and imagination to admit that it is an impure and ill-defined intellectual discipline. There is surely a sense in which the golden age of post-war philosophy in Oxford and Cambridge of which these thinkers played a vital part fulfils the sentiment of ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ This brings us to another key point which has been fundamental to the spirit of the book. It is the conviction that dialogue is uniquely conducive to philosophical understanding and progress. This idea, of course, goes 6  G.  E. Lessing, Eine Duplik, quoted in Lessings Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H. Chadwick (1956: A and C Black, London), 43.

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back to Socrates but it has lost none of its resonance. It isn’t just that we get a better grasp of a philosopher’s thoughts when they are examined in the company of other philosophers. It is the deeper lesson that the ebb and flow of genuine conversation and inevitable disagreement is more often than not the expression as well as the engine of philosophical illumination and discovery. The unique effect of intellectual conversation is captured by Berlin’s life-long editor, Henry Hardy, who describes what it felt like being in Berlin’s incandescent company: Being in his [Berlin’s] presence and hearing him talk you were made aware of areas of human potential which might not otherwise have occurred to you. It’s exactly what he himself said about some of the geniuses he met. He said that talking to a genius, perhaps Pasternak, or Akhmatova or perhaps Virginia Woolf enlarged your sense of what human beings could be and do, ideas of ways of being human which just wouldn’t have occurred to you if you hadn’t met somebody like this. So, in a way, his life and his conversation demonstrate the ways of being human that he elucidates in his work. He was a living example of his theories. You felt when you were talking to him that you were taken up to a level of intellectual competence or inspiration or personal potential which exceeded the normal resting level at which you lived your life. You came out walking on air and feeling excited and inspired and enlarged.7

Genuine dialogue is also an effective remedy to rigging the argument in one’s favour and a reminder of the originally humanist maxim audi alteram partem (listen to the other side). It wasn’t for nothing that Plato was convinced that the passivity and beguiling authority of the written word—as distinct from the genuine dialectic of live discussion and debate—was more of a foe than a friend of intellectual curiosity and enlightenment. More importantly,  dialogic philosophical reflection suggests that philosophy is less about arriving at fixed doctrines and definitive solutions and more about asking and probing the right questions. The central questions of philosophy frequently remain unanswered—some of the deepest ones may even be unanswerable—or get supplanted by better ones but this does not render them either trivial or meaningless. On the contrary, philosophical enlightenment often occurs when we are 7  See, Discovering Isaiah Berlin: Johnny Lyons in conversation with Henry Hardy. A transcript of the interview is published on the Isaiah Berlin Virtual library: http://berlin.wolf. ox.ac.uk/lists/onib/lyons-hardy-transcript.pdf, 29.

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confronted with a seemingly insoluble yet endlessly complex and troubling problem. Mental cramp can be the outcome as well as the inspiration of philosophy. Moreover, intellectual doubt and discomfort are neither empty nor useless—they have a proud and distinguished pedigree in the tradition of western speculation and have been closely  associated with moderation, toleration and freedom. Indeed, Bertrand Russell was convinced that if we all became sceptics human life would be revolutionised for the better.8 Such remarks can remind us of the words of Rilke: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue...Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.9

But can we claim in good faith that philosophical progress is possible if its most profound problems are recalcitrant, if its fundamental questions persist in being unsolved? And is there a risk that an acceptance of pluralism becomes indistinguishable from a certain kind of mental flaccidness? The reflections of Hilary Putnam are apt yet again: I take it as a fact of life that there is a sense in which the task of philosophy is to overcome metaphysics and a sense in which its task is to continue metaphysical discussion. In every philosopher there is a part that cries, “This enterprise is vain, frivolous, crazy – we must say ‘Stop’” and a part that cries, “This enterprise is simply reflection at the most general and abstract level; to put a stop to it would be a crime against reason.” Of course philosophical problems are unsolvable; but as Stanley Cavell once remarked, “there are better and worse ways of thinking about them.”10

No honest thinker would wish to deny that a smart way of thinking about philosophical problems is to try to be clear, precise and rigorous about whatever particular issue is being treated. A commitment to analytically lucid and sustained argument which cuts through the mists of confusion and obfuscation is among the great strengths of the Anglophone tradition of philosophy at its best, traits that Berlin and his interlocutors  Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (2004 ed.: Routledge, London), 3.  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (2012 ed.: Penguin, London). 10  Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (1990: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), 19. 8 9

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exemplify in their distinctive ways. But as H. H. Price declared in the title of his Presidential Address to the Mind Association in 1945, sometimes ‘Clarity is not enough’.11 A concern for lucidity and exactness needs to be balanced with a recognition that certain questions may not lend themselves to clear and definitive answers or, if they do, only to a certain degree. One of the great blind spots of the analytic tradition is its quasi-­pathological intolerance of a certain kind of radical indeterminacy, or what might even amount to inarticulable, yet genuine, depth. Most, if not all, of philosophy’s most serious and enduring questions possess an elusive dimension, an unpindownable complexity and even mystery (but not mysticism) that can be denied only by redefining them as something unrecognisably different from what they are and imply. Analytic philosophy’s legitimate resistance to pretentious and tumid metaphysical speculations can prevent it from seeing that not all concepts and categories of thought are susceptible to transparent and determinate analysis and elucidation, but they are no less crucial and illuminating for that reason. Strawson’s opening line in his paper ‘Self, Mind and Body’ captures part of the essence of this unreductionist philosophical outlook nicely: One of the marks, though not a necessary mark, of a really great philosopher is to make a really great mistake: that is to say, to give a persuasive and lastingly influential form to one of those fundamental misconceptions to which the human intellect is prone when it concerns itself with the ultimate categories of thought. (FR 169)

Strawson’s observation alerts us to another vital characteristic of philosophy, that it is as much, if not more, a mode of thinking and being as it is a search for a stable and significant corpus of understanding and knowledge. This in turn helps explain why intellectual temperament is more germane to philosophy than most analytically-trained  philosophers are willing to admit: some philosophers are more capable of living with an unsolved and possibly insoluble problem than others, and yet never cease trying to probe the problem as thoroughly and imaginatively as they did at the beginning of their enquiries.12  Presidential Address to the Mind Association delivered at the Joint Session of the Mind and Aristotelian Society in July 1945 and published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, Vol. XIX. 12  This is not to suggest that there should be room only for philosophers who are more capable of and comfortable with probing problems rather than finding or inventing solutions. Philosophy is a broad church and it no doubt needs problem-solving (and problem11

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Trying to answer the first question, namely, whether philosophical questions are susceptible to a single, objectively correct answer, is itself one of philosophy’s more inscrutable challenges. Unsurprisingly, one of the most difficult aspects of that question is trying to determine what role, if any, the truth might play in answering it. Denying that truth has a place in addressing the question seems self-defeating while affirming that it’s at the heart of the matter presupposes the very thing being questioned. As we noted earlier, P. F. Strawson’s general view of truth’s place in philosophical questions suggests a path beyond this unpalatable dead-end. Recall his remark: But philosophy, which takes human thought in general as its field, is not thus conveniently confined; and truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faceted, that any individual philosopher’s work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force.13

Strawson’s comment seems about right, not saying too much or too little.14 For he manages to acknowledge the inexhaustibility and elusiveness of the truth without denying its relevance or objectivity. A full grasp of the truth seems unreachable, and its very essence resistant to being domesticated. The following remarks about truth by C. S. Pierce’s are helpful here: You certainly think that there is such a thing as truth. Otherwise, reasoning and thought would be without a purpose. What do you mean by there being such a thing as Truth? You mean that something is SO… whether you or I or anybody thinks it is so or not. […] The essence of the opinion is that there is something that is SO, no matter if there be an overwhelming vote

dissolving) minds as much as it does solution-producing  ones—needless to say, a single thinker can possess both kinds of mental and imaginative  agility. But the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the former with the result that much professional academic philosophy has become far too hidebound and scientistic for its own good. 13  P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985: Columbia University press, New York), vii. 14  Quassim Cassam manages to convey this aspect of Strawson’s realism by describing it as a ‘relaxed realism that has little time for reductionism, scientism or other forms of philosophical extremism.’ See Quassim Cassam’s Foreword to P.  F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (2008 ed.: Routledge, London), xv.

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against it. So you plainly opine. For if thinking otherwise is going to make it otherwise, there is no use in reasoning […].15

It would seem that all we can realistically expect ever to achieve is to gain a partial and inescapably perspectival impression of it. So, on the one hand, there is a recognition that, to paraphrase Hegel’s celebrated statement in the preface to his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, the truth’s meaning necessarily reflects the contingent thought of its own time. And, on the other hand, there is the seemingly sane and vital belief that the truth possesses a meaning and status that is not exhausted by how a particular individual or epoch happens to define it. Is this, then, a case of having your cake and eating it? Moreover, might the truth in the sense intimated by Strawson be not so much elusive as non-existent? It is, of course, possible to give an affirmative answer to both questions. One might argue, after all, along Rortian lines, that we should forget about Truth since it’s no longer a philosophically credible or useful notion.16 Indeed, Rorty argues that not only has the truth in any kind of metaphysical and non-platitudinous sense lost its believability but we can get along perfectly well without it. Berlin and several of his interlocutors, however, give us grounds for doubting that dispensing with the notion of truth would be theoretically wise or practically workable. They suggest, some more explicitly than others, that the idea or, better still, ideal of truth is worth staying true to even if it can’t escape its own frustrating yet inevitable antinomies. Chief among these is the problem of holding on to the notion of a univocal conception of truth; we experience what presents itself as an overwhelming tension in trying to reconcile the putative truths of science with those of ethics or aesthetics since accepting the former appears to preclude or, at least, seriously compromise the latter in some fatal and unavoidable way. But one is still left thinking that the Anglophone philosophical establishment has not been as open as it should be to the idea that there may well be a plurality of different and perhaps incommensurable truths and systems of knowledge.17 15  Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and (vols. 7 and 8) Arthur Burks, eds. (1931–58: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass), vol.2, 135. 16  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980: Basil Blackwell, Oxford) and more concisely in his paper ‘Solidarity or Objectivity’ in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (1991: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). 17  The recent work of Crispin Wright, Michael P. Lynch and others suggests that the tide may be turning in favour of an acceptance of a more pluralistic understanding of truth.

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And one of the more obvious ways it has exhibited this reductive and impoverished tendency is in its neglect of the fact that the analytic tradition itself is only one of many valid ways of pursuing philosophy. Perhaps it’s time that the Anglophone philosophical tradition began to give as much weight to the notion of true to as much as true of, of being more open to acknowledging that there are legitimate yet competing ways of understanding ourselves and our relation to the world. Surely, a legitimate and noble species of understanding is the kind that seeks to occupy a maximally dispassionate perspective within (rather than per impossibile outside of) the untranscendable realm of human thought.

But Does Philosophy Make any Progress? Notwithstanding such philosophical perplexities and possibilities, the preceding chapters have, I hope, prompted a fitful scepticism about the prevailing faith in the power of science to furnish the only objective version of reality as well as a greater openness to the fertility and integrity of non-­ scientific forms of human understanding and knowledge. Such equivocal scepticism is, of course, entirely compatible with a fundamental respect for the methods and achievements of science. Affirming the plurality of our modes of understanding is not an invitation to take sides in the hackneyed and mainly idiotic debate between the sciences and the humanities.18 Rather it is about giving the different and occasionally rival conceptions of human understanding the space they need to breath and prosper. Philosophy as invention is as legitimate as philosophy as discovery, since philosophy is as much a creative and dynamically orientated enterprise as it is an analytic one.

18  The Nobel laureate Peter Medawar emphasises the importance of this point with typical force and elegance in his Romanes Lecture for 1968, ‘Science and Literature’. He argues that the conflict is not between science and literature but scientism and poetism. The latter modes of discourse are ‘equally contemptible’ since there is no need for us to take sides as they spuriously suggest:

‘No one need beat his breast and say, ‘Now I am on the side of the poets’, because poets are not really on that side and scientists not really on the other.’ Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic (1982: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 60.

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But it does not seem right to end this book without revisiting the knotty matter of whether there can be any progress in philosophy, especially if we wish to view philosophy humanistically rather than in an exclusively or primarily naturalistic way. After all, much of what has been said might suggest that there has been little or no progress in philosophy, that it remains an invitation to endless and fruitless dissent. There are, of course, various ways of responding to this question and some of them have been touched on directly or indirectly in the preceding pages. One of the main arguments of this book is that the absence of conclusive answers to the problems of philosophy need not be seen as a symptom of the flimsiness and futility of the philosophical project. That may seem a very limited and negative claim, but it is nonetheless a crucial one and not simply within the narrowly academic world of philosophy. The idea that philosophy has not produced more agreement since its inception has been a source of dissatisfaction and embarrassment to many philosophers, especially those who see the subject as modelled on the natural and exact sciences. But dissatisfaction with philosophy’s apparent poverty of progress has also been interpreted in a very different way by non-foundational, anti-realist thinkers like Richard Rorty, who argue that we should give up asking the time-honoured questions of philosophy, since they reached their expiry date a long time ago. Outside the precincts of university philosophy departments, members of the public who bother to take notice of professional philosophy are no doubt mystified that its practitioners have not generated a definitive solution to even one of the problems raised by Socrates and his successors. A lay suspicion that philosophy is a waste of time and money is an ever-present danger and one that informed Michael Dummett’s observation that, ‘if universities had been an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied? It seems very doubtful.’19 But if we are not tempted by purely scientific or, alternatively, postmodern models of philosophy (or post-philosophy), it’s emphatically not the case that we are bereft of other ways of making sense of the recalcitrance of philosophical questions. One way of trying to explain the stubborness of philosophical problems is to invoke Berlin’s argument which claims that philosophical problems are not necessarily any less real and urgent on account of being 19  Michael Dummett, The Nature and Future of Philosophy, (2010: Columbia University Press, New York), 2.

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recalcitrant, of being unsusceptible to uniquely correct and conclusive answers. Berlin’s definition of a philosophical problem, of what distinguishes a problem as philosophical is that it is in a crucial way unanswerable.20 The problem with this conception of philosophy is that it strikes many as unduly defeatist. For surely the value and indeed energy of philosophy lies in the interest of the questions it confronts as well as its success in answering them. But this general retort can be too quick and shallow. It tends to assume that philosophical questions are atemporal and that there are or ought to be final answers to them. Neither of these assumptions holds much water. The vast majority of philosophical questions come and go, and even the more enduring ones are understood and treated very differently in different times as well as by different thinkers and schools of philosophy; some originally philosophical questions get hived off as topics or even subjects for legitimate scientific research, others cease, rightly or wrongly, to retain their interest, while several new ones emerge that could never have occurred or even been conceived in bygone eras. It would require a spectacularly optimistic outlook to claim that the history of human thought reveals a record of fundamentally rational and intellectually virtuous progress. In fact, one of the major lessons of history is that there has been a multiplicity of avenues that we might have taken as a species and that none of these paths comes with an infallible cognitive health warning. It may be an exaggeration to say that history is a story told by a fool but not as much as we may smugly like to believe. But unlike other kinds of enquiry, philosophy faces a peculiar challenge when it comes to confronting the question of its perceived lack of tangible advancement. In contrast to other subjects, especially in humanities, philosophy’s identity is inextricably bound up with the goal of adhering to the demands of knowledge and the ideal of truth. And unless we are willing to accept the notion that pursuing philosophy leads to learned ignorance, even of a profound and edifying form, philosophy suffers from an identity crisis in drastic need of reform. Someone like P. F. Strawson who is not in the least wedded to a narrowly scientific view of philosophy would, no doubt, resist the suggestion that the defining characteristic of a philosophical question is its unanswerability. He and his like-minded 20  See Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (1993: Blackwell, Oxford) for an interesting version of the view that philosophical questions may be unanswerable which seeks to make sense of the unanswerability of such problems on the basis of the inherent limitations in our epistemic faculties.

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brethren would argue that philosophical problems are not necessarily or, at least, entirely theoretically intractable, that many of the most perplexing philosophical issues are the result of superficial thinking and/or conceptual confusion and are therefore resolvable. And so the seemingly endless debate goes on. However, the depth and pervasiveness of philosophical disagreement and apparent lack of concrete progress do not mean that its questions or the attempts to answer them are meaningless or futile. There are, after all, better and worse philosophical questions just as there are better and worse ways of treating them. The better questions touch on or capture something particularly paradoxical or profound or neglected about human thought that strike us as intrisically interesting or true or urgent in some non-trivial and inescapable way. The better attempts to address these questions are the ones that do them justice either by identifying what makes them so pressing or by coming up with ways of demonstrating how they can be overcome and dispensed with. Moreover, this is not something that is peculiar to philosophical reflection; for example, the limits of our naturalistic understanding are not just objectively real but frequently disclose things about our understanding that are deeply revealing.21 Berlin’s understanding of philosophy prompts us to rethink what progress might mean in relation to philosophical enquiry. Rather than defining philosophical progression in the conventional sense of solving problems and answering questions, Berlin’s approach suggests that philosophical achievement centres primarily in recognising what makes philosophical problems peculiarly difficult to answer and yet profoundly irresistible. This perspective does not preclude the possibility that certain philosophical problems may end up being solved nor does it require that yesterday’s or today’s philosophical problems will be tomorrow’s. Rather it insists that the success of philosophy neither relies upon nor is measured by the discovery of definitive solutions to its problems. Put briefly, philosophy is chiefly concerned with intractable problems, not soluble and optional puzzles.22 21  John D. Barrow provides a good discussion of this feature of scientific understanding in his Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits (1998: Oxford University Press, Oxford). 22  The idea that problems rather than solutions are more definitive of the philosophical enterprise is not peculiar to Berlin. Other notable philosophers who are sympathetic to this viewpoint include Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (1979: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), ix-xii; Barry Stroud, ‘What is Philosophy’ in C.  P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt

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Of course, philosophy does not decide by itself what all or even most of the big questions, let alone the best or better answers, are. This isn’t only because it is a parasitic activity that starts (but doesn’t end) from what’s already there and considers new or hidden or forgotten ways of thinking about the world and ourselves. It is also because it’s a mode of reflection that is radically promiscuous as well as far more self-conscious than other types of enquiry which tend to take our underlying presuppositions and basic patterns of thought for granted. Philosophers are prone to tenaciously peeling back the layers of thought and language in an effort to see what, if anything, lies beneath them. Berlin articulates this restless and rebellious side of philosophy in his essay, ‘Philosophy and Government Repression’: Philosophy is an attempt, and has always been an attempt, to find ways of thinking and talking which, by revealing similarities hitherto unnoticed, and differences hitherto unremarked (sometimes by drawing new analogies with hitherto unthought-of models, or pointing with new emphasis at ignored or underestimated differences between the models hitherto followed and the objects alleged to be like them), cause a transformation of outlook sufficient to alter radically attitudes and ways of thought and speech, and in this way solve or dissolve problems, redistribute subjects, reformulate and reclassify relationships between objects, and transform our vision of the world. This, as in the analogous case of the arts, is something which can be performed only within and for each generation separately, for the vision of one generation must always, if formulated in words, frozen into techniques, established as an orthodoxy, become a prison-house for the next or next but one; and therefore no ‘progress’ in the precise sense can be expected; each generation requires its own osteopathic operation, its own new insights, its own self-­ liberation, its own powerful men of genius to transfigure its vision, establish new relationships and new differences. (SR2 81)

Berlin and others argue that a basic requirement of understanding ourselves, of grasping the concepts and categories of human thought that underpin its more explicit features, is to discover how the show between our ears evolved in the way it did to get us to where we are today. This means that not only is history integral to the philosophical enterprise, but so too is a radically open-ended and necessarily incomplete reflectiveness eds., What is Philosophy? (2001: Yale University Press, New Haven), 25–46; and, more recently, several essays in Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick eds., Philosophy’s Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress (2017: Wiley Blackwell, Oxford).

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that alone can act as a glue that binds history and philosophy together. Berlin famously said that he moved from philosophy to history as he felt it would be better ‘to know more at the end of one’s life than when one had begun’ (CC2 xxvii). Once philosophy acknowledges that it needs history it opens up a bottomless resource that strengthens as well as challenges its self-image and authority. It’s not just that it becomes open to seeing the past as a genuine source of wisdom (as distinct from a distant hinterland that is safe for condescension). It also takes on the consciousness of contingency (or historicity) which keeps it true to itself. One of the main insights of contingency is a loss of faith in the point and authority of what Williams called theory, the idea that it is possible and desirable to produce systematic and universally applicable rationalistic principles that structure how we ought to understand and live our lives. But what is philosophy left with if it gives up on such a grand, if empty, theoretical ambition? Pondering that question can be both unsettling and liberating. On the one hand, it forces us to confront the very real possibility that much of philosophical theory, especially in the domain of practical reason, has not been a particularly worthwhile endeavour. On the other, it invites us to consider what philosophy might become if it finds the confidence and imagination to adopt a fundamentally broader, freer and mixed form of intellectual enquiry. The latter option is likely to give us a far more realistic sense of how and why philosophy matters. It’s worth mentioning, in this vein, Avishai Margalit’s recollection of conversations he had with Berlin about traditional analytic philosophy: On occasion Berlin’s disengagement from analytic philosophy was expressed not just as a personal choice guided by personal tastes, but as a general stand against analytic philosophy. I remember discussing with him the question: Is analytic philosophy an endless effort to sharpen knives, but with no meat to cut, or is it rather a discipline which follows Abraham Lincoln’s advice that, if you are going to cut down trees, you would do better to spend six hours sharpening your axe and only two hours trees? You see, he said, doesn’t the fact that we pose the question in similes tell you how far we are removed from doing philosophy? (POI xiv)23 23  Berlin refers to this feature of our attempts to respond to philosophical question in an interview he did with Bryan Magee:

E. M. Forster once said: ‘Everything is like something: what is this like?’ That is what you tend to begin by asking in the case of philosophical questions. Historically, what

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As we have seen, Berlin’s way of doing history ended up being a continuation of philosophy by other means. It contrasts sharply with the logical positivist and linguistic schools of philosophy which define philosophy’s job in terms of a method. Reading Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic is an incomparably different experience to reading Berlin’s Fours Essays on Liberty or indeed any of his works. The former is abstract and formal where the latter is concrete and substantive. The contrast becomes less pronounced in comparison with Austin’s brand of ‘linguistic phenomenology’ and Strawson’s conception of ‘descriptive metaphysics’ and yet both place a heavy reliance and  trust in the self-sufficiency of linguistic and/or conceptual analysis. Skinner’s writings stand out in two formidable ways in relation to our discussion; firstly, they show the absurdities that result from ahistorical analytic ‘histories’ of philosophy and, more constructively, in  the lessons that derive from  and draw upon contextually-­ based intellectual history, especially those rooted in a recognition of the radical discontinuities and contingencies of the past. Secondly, and more problematically, they create a radical tension between the distinct and seemingly legitimate concerns of history and philosophy which threatens the coherence of considering the truth value of past ideas. Skinner may well be right about the radical implications of contextual history for contemporary philosophical understanding, particularly moral and political philosophy, but, rightly or wrongly, I remain unconvinced that a recognition of our historicity requires an abandonment of a concern for truth. The affinity of philosophical sensibility and style is most evident between Berlin and late Williams, that is, the Williams of Shame and Necessity and onwards. They share a vision of philosophy that is humanistically-minded, historically self-aware and normatively committed. One of the effects of reading them is precisely that you come away knowing more about things that humanly matter than you did before you entered their company and in a way that manages to combine historical and philosophical understanding convincingly and, at times, even seamlessly. This form of understanding and knowledge is not easy to describe. One could characterise their style as an expression of a certain perception which is peculiarly well suited seems to have happened is this: certain important, and indeed crucial, questions seem to dwell in this ambivalent state. People have worried themselves deeply about them—naturally enough, since they were to a high degree concerned with ultimate values. Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas, (1978: BBC, London), 25–6.

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to telling us something reflectively authoritative and revealing about the deeper realities of human life, realities that have a historical dimension but whose meaning and importance are not exhausted by purely historical assumptions and concerns. Another way of describing their very similar approach is to compare it with the experience of reading a serious work of literature. One notable parallel is that just as it would be absurd to write a novel, for instance, without using one’s imagination, so it would be equally ludicrous for a philosopher to suspend his or her imaginative understanding in thinking philosophically. Nobody questions the appeal or validity of literature as a subject on the basis that it has failed to produce the unimprovable novel or poem (whatever that would conceivably look like), let alone on the grounds that it is silly to believe that we can still derive pleasure and edification from artistic works that were produced many centuries ago. To paraphrase Seamus Heaney on poetry, ‘philosophy’s career starts in wonder and ends in self-consciousness’. That is a sentiment which might count as a not misleading summation of the effect of reading Berlin and Williams as well as several of the other philosophers who have featured in this book. They are, in Williams’ words, concerned ‘with making the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves.’24 None of this is to suggest, of course, that philosophy is or ought to be regarded as a genre of imaginative literature.25 But it should be interpreted as confirmation that philosophy, like literature, is not a subject with a clearly defined method and subject matter even if it is, unlike literature, a discipline that is as committed to a peculiar precision and generality of argument as it is to imaginative thinking. Yet how can such an inherently promiscuous conception of philosophy stay true to its age-old and surely crucial allegiance to what Williams refers to as, getting things right. As we have noted in an earlier chapter, philosophy without vision may be blind but philosophy without argument can become little more than from a heightened form of belle-lettrism. For  ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, 182.  One is reminded in this context of Iris Murdoch’s closing line in her essay ‘Against Dryness’: 24 25

‘Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts, in W.H. Auden’s words, to use it as magic.’ Encounter, January 1961. It is interesting to reflect on the distinctive ways in which philosophy can invigorate without consoling.

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there is the not unfounded worry that philosophy’s core aim of seeking to track the truth should not be made any more treacherous than it is already is by adding the requirement that it must be answerable to history as well. Just how impure can philosophy become before it collapses under the weight of unwieldly and promiscuous interests? This concern is exacerbated by the even greater risk that the integrity and independence of truth could leave itself fatally compromised by too close an association with historicity and imagination. It’s unclear what implications a more historically informed and imaginatively ambitious conception of philosophy would have in relation to the goal of being true to the truth and what kind of truth would be authoritative and germane in such a context. But it is also far from obvious that doing philosophy humanistically requires us to forsake the truth. It is more likely that we will need to transform our understanding of what counts as non-vacuously true and the extent to which that notion or ideal can be coherently and more fully pursued. Berlin’s example reminds us that many of the ‘truths’ of philosophy were and remain believable only by excluding much of the world, especially the world of human phenomena, that is central to philosophical understanding. A more likely outcome is that our conception of the nature and value of truth will become more intimately linked to historical self-­consciousness and extra-scientific paradigms of human understanding. This again will pose a challenge, as truth and history (and humanistic disciplines, more generally) have tended to behave like ships at night, regarding each other with indifference or suspicion. But the option of keeping them in unsplendid isolation from each other is likely to diminish rather than enrich them. And one of the central ways in which truth can help history (and humanity) and vice versa is by testifying to the ambivalence and precariousness of what they have to tell us and why a neglect of such a perspective would amount to a very real and grave human loss, including a betrayal of our commitment to truth itself. As Williams states: To understand any power that philosophy may have over our ethical outlooks, we need a good deal more than philosophy itself.26

26  Michael Dummett, The Nature and Future of Philosophy, (2010: Columbia University Press, New York), 2.

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No doubt many Anglophone moral and political philosophers will carry on plying their trade in a strenuously abstract, impersonal and ahistorical manner, but that is no more or less interesting than the inertia of any inherently uninteresting intellectual habit. A more fruitful option surely lies in working out how a genuinely pluralistic, historically-minded philosophy negotiates and develops its relationship with truth and knowledge. It is likely that the connection between the two will be persistently unpredictable and unstable, since the insights of contingency tend to pull in the opposite direction of what we have traditionally regarded as the dictates of truth and objectivity. This in turn may prompt us to reimagine how we understand the nature of truth and history and their vital, friction-­ laden relation to each other. That seems to me a more productive and worthy possibility. It also coheres with Bernard Williams late musings about what philosophy might ideally become: We can dream of a philosophy that would be thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful. This, of course, implies an impossible combination of characteristics. It would be argumentively well-ordered  – that would be part of what made it philosophy  – but it would retain the possibility, both in its content and in its manner, of being unsettling rather than reassuring. It would speak to a grown-up reader in terms that that person could recognise as worth listening to.27

I don’t think it is much of an exaggeration to claim that Berlin exemplified, at least in part, Williams’ dream of what philosophy could be. He achieved this by showing that the questions of philosophy are where the real philosophical action resides. Berlin’s example suggests that ‘getting things right’ involves paying attention to and absorbing rather than necessarily ‘resolving’ the deepest human questions and, crucially, being open to the very real possibility that these questions may be finally unanswerable. He is, if you like, the Turgenev or perhaps Chekhov of philosophy, a thinker who felt that it wasn’t his job to engage in the ‘irritable reaching’ for answers to life’s big questions but to formulate their complex character and enduring importance as truthfully and revealingly as possible. What he said of both these great Russian writers can be said of him too:

27  Bernard Williams, ‘What Might Philosophy Become?’ in his Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006: Princeton University press, Princeton, NJ), 212.

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Chekhov once said that a writer’s business was not to provide solutions, only to describe a situation so truthfully, do such justice to all sides of the question, that the reader could no longer evade it. The doubts Turgenev raised have not been stilled. The dilemma of morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at times of acute polarisation of opinion has, since his time, grown world-wide. The predicament of what, for him, was only the ‘educated section’ of a country then scarcely regarded as fully European, has come to be that of men in every class of society in our day. He recognised this predicament in its very beginnings and described it with incomparable sharpness of vision, poetry, and truth. (RT2 349–50)28

Dealing with the Mess It is a fine, if dismaying, question why and how humanity has made such a mess of things. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of our time on the planet provides a predominantly dark tale of strife and misery lightly peppered by moments of peace and enlightenment. Every age has had its own man-made and natural disasters to contend with, but the existential challenges we face now are distinctive in at least three major ways. The first is that we have the nuclear capacity to destroy all human life as well as most other living organisms. The second is the global reality of climate change for which we have, as yet, no feasible solution. The third is that we seem incapable or unwilling to address our existential threats even though in the case of climate change, we have definitive scientific data to show that the world is burning up at an alarming rate. On 23 January 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the famous Doomsday Clock which symbolises the gravest perils facing humankind had moved twenty seconds closer to midnight, the nearest it has been at any point since its establishment in 1947. “The Doomsday Clock is a globally recognized indicator of the vulnerability of our existence,” said former Irish President and Chair of the Elders Mary Robinson at the annual clock-unveiling ceremony. “It’s a striking metaphor for the precarious state of the world, but most frighteningly, it’s a metaphor backed by rigorous scientific scrutiny.” It is hard to imagine any age facing a bigger, humanly-caused mess than the one we face today. Moreover, the

28  I try to capture this aspect of Berlin’s thought in my essay ‘Philosopher of the human’, Aeon, December 2019: https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-isaiah-berlin-tell-us-aboutpolitical-freedom-today

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gulf between our power to destroy ourselves and the wisdom needed to protect humanity is deep and wide.29 In these bleak circumstances, it may seem a grossly fanciful, even absurd, question to ask how philosophy might help us address our various and urgent crises. And yet the question becomes less incongruous once you consider the more obvious candidates such as the natural and exact sciences, religion, economics, law, or the social sciences. Believing that philosophy could and should have a role to play does not mean that it is any more likely to produce a magic wand than any other human intervention. In fact, one of the more useful, if negative, tasks philosophy is particularly good at is identifying wishful thinking as well as other epistemological vices such as dogmatism, short-sightedness, intellectual arrogance, and unconscious bias. More constructively, it can clarify the nature and implications of virtues such as respect for truth, intellectual humility and carefulness, wisdom, curiosity, and what Berlin called ‘a sense of reality’.30 Of course philosophy does not have a monopoly of understanding when it comes to these particular virtues and vices. But, at its best, it brings a definite system, vision, and depth that are not typically found in most other forms of enquiry. Let’s imagine there exists a global committee of the great and good charged with addressing the largest and most pressing existential threats of our age. Let’s also imagine that this expert committee is convinced that philosophy can help it with its task. What’s the committee’s next step? The obvious move might be to round up the leading professional philosophers in the world. The immediate problem with that approach is that there is a wide range of top academic philosophers who specialise in specific branches of the subject, from symbolic logic, the philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology to the philosophy of mind, aesthetics and moral and political theory, allied to the fact that the kind of intellectual expertise and techniques that academic philosophers typically possess are not necessarily the ones that will be of help to the committee. This says something about both the impact of academic specialisation in philosophy, which has reached chronic levels, as well as the subject of philosophy itself. It is most 29  For a recent philosophical view of ‘the defining challenge of our time’, see Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020: Bloomsbury, London). 30  See Berlin’s lecture ‘The Sense of Reality’ in the book of the same name as well as his more famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. The ‘sense of reality’ is not a term that invites a concise, straightforward definition.

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likely that the committee will benefit mainly, though not exclusively, from philosophical generalists rather than pure specialists, which in turn will have the effect of vastly reducing the number of potentially qualified candidates. There are a number of contemporary professional philosophers one can think of who might fit the bill, and several of them are already contributing in their own way to helping humanity’s cause. When the world faced a very different cataclysm in 1939 four of the six philosophers discussed in this book found themselves either directly or indirectly applying their intellectual skills to the war effort. One of them, John Austin, ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel and received decorations for his distinguished service from the French (Croix de Guerre), Americans (Officer of the Legion of Merit) and the British Military OBE. It was officially recorded that ‘he more than anybody was responsible for the life-­ saving accuracy of the D-Day Intelligence’. And as we noted in the introduction, Bernard Williams served on several committees and commissions including chairing the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (1979) and, incidentally, one of the main conclusions of that report is that there are far more pressing matters to preoccupy society than an excessive concern with obscenity.31 More generally, all six thinkers discussed in this book have demonstrated in their own unique and arresting way that philosophy in the broadest sense matters by reminding us how fascinating and indispensable reason, truth and history are when we reflect on them with the care and seriousness they require; they have  all done more than their share of keeping the philosophical conversation going. They also show that the onset of modernity (or post-modernity) does not entail a total loss of confidence in the power of philosophy to help us make sense of the human condition and live less untruthful and gratuitously meaningless lives. In a nutshell, they help us to recognise the difficulty of making cognitive and ethical sense of our lives without giving up hope that achieving such sense is both possible and valuable. As I mentioned in the opening chapter, one of the more neglected tragedies of contemporary life is that philosophers and, more broadly, public intellectuals are now so rarely asked for their views about the hot issues of the day. We are living in a publicity-intoxicated and unnervingly unreflective world which renders it virtually impossible for ideas of any 31  Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report, Bernard Williams ed. (1981: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), see the concluding remarks in the section on ‘Harms’ in Part 2 of the Report, 124–5.

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depth and complexity to take root in what’s left of our shared cultural and ethical horizon. We may enjoy the technological prowess to disseminate information instantly to billions of people, yet we have become oblivious of the difference between informed thought and potted thinking, expertise and charlatanism, principle and expediency. And, of course, registering this predicament doesn’t even begin to address the deep-seated atomism and growing inequalities of contemporary society. The profound malaise of our current situation is depressing in itself but its effect on immobilising our capacity to respond to our existential crises is catastrophic. Moreover, it is difficult to see a way out of our situation given the multiplicity and potency of ideologically myopic and frequently odious forces which are ranged against producing anything that resembles a viable and humanly decent solution. The gloominess of my outlook derives less from qualms about the survival of democracy and more from a sense that politics seems powerless to alleviate the far deeper problem of our socio-economic and environmental situation. Does this mean that we should simply give up and retire ruefully to the cultivation of our own gardens? That option has a certain appeal, not least in its resigned, if lugubrious, recognition of the apparent ineluctability of our looming self-­ extinction. In these circumstances, one finds it hard not to recall Nietzsche’s dark and disarming opening to ‘On Truth and Lie in the Non-Moral Sense’: In some remote corner of the sprawling universe, twinkling among the countless solar systems, there once was a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant, most mendacious minute in ‘world history,’ but it was only a minute. After nature caught its breath a little, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die.32

32  Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings (2010: Harper Perennial, New York), 17–8. Nietzsche’s remark prompts a multitude of thoughts. One is the question of in what ways we could describe the end of humanity as a tragedy? I remain stumped about how best to answer that question, including whether it is itself a coherent question. After all, the extinction of the human race is inevitable so why should it matter if it happens prematurely? A crucial element might be thought to lie in the extent to which humanity determines its own existential fate and the extent to which it does what it can to prolong its existence either on earth or on some other planet. But it’s not clear that is the right way to think about the matter. For if it emerged that we could find a way of mitigating the effects of, for example, global warming for a thousand years, we would still be faced with much the same question in a millennium from now. On one level, timing is everything and, on another, it is merely, if unavoidably, arbitrary in the great, uncaring scheme of things.

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Yet it is far from clear that such a perfunctory way of living is feasible. It’s one thing to fall drunkenly over the precipice but quite another to take much delight in what’s left of the crepuscular fruits of the earth in the guilty knowledge that future generations will reap the unimaginable destruction that we and our immediate forebears have so irresponsibly and lethally sowed. As early as 1919, Anna Akhmatova judged that the twentieth century was ‘worse than any other’.33 A hundred years on, we are facing the very real and disturbing prospect that the century that was marked by two world wars and mass slaughter will be succeeded by the century of unprecedented environmental ruin and the sharp decline, if not the end, of the human species. Many of us find it difficult to live with ourselves and others without hope, even or especially when our hope is purely a matter of attitude rather than derived from objective evidence.34 This is typically a form of hope that is based on the will to avoid being overcome by despair (or becoming over-impressed with being haughtily dismayed) rather than on any belief in a utopian future. It might even be a form of hope that is compatible with what Nietzsche called ‘the pessimism of strength.’35 In that spirit it is surely imperative that more of us get in touch with the philosopher inside us, at least to some degree. And I mean that in the steadfastly untranscendent, unacademic and personal sense of the term: we need to reckon with the reality of our situation and one of the ways we can do this is by ceasing to live complacent, ignorant lives and, more positively, of seeing truthful and even hopeful reflection as part of a better way of being human. If not now, when? The qualities of the intellect are not exclusively cognitive. One is reminded of W. B. Yeats’ exhortation “to hold in a single thought reality 33  From ‘Plantain’ in Anna Akhmatova; Selected Poems D.  M. Thomas trans. (1988 ed.: Penguin, London), 49. 34  Generally speaking, the initial period of the world’s response to Covid-19 has shown that we can transform deeply entrenched behaviours quickly and universally which in turn suggests that a radical transformation of how we live our lives is not as unfeasible as we might have assumed before the outbreak of the pandemic. It also confirms that an appeal to people’s self-interest still remains a crucially effective way of securing collective action on a grand scale. Perhaps Covid-19 will prove instructive in helping us recognise that it is only through collective reasoning and co-operation that we have any hope of addressing climate change. One is reminded of the wisdom of Ian Hacking’s remark that the solution to the prisoner’s dilemma may lie in seeing it as the prisoners’ dilemma, New York Review of Books, June 28, 1984. 35  Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, The Birth of Tragedy (1993: Penguin, London) 3.

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and justice.”36 The virtues of the mind interact with the virtues of the ethical and political self, just as the vices of the mind bleed into and from the corrupt or sick soul. Honesty is the more natural mother of toleration just as fanaticism is the more likely child of delusion  and oppression. Now more than ever we must (re)learn and exemplify a practical and public commitment to truth, sincerity, freedom of thought, accuracy, and intellectual humility, and a similarly pragmatic and political rejection of dogmatism, prejudice, muddle-headedness, gullibility, bullshit and blatant lying. If we do, we may stand a chance of diminishing or, at least, deferring the baleful effects of our self-induced drift towards further environmental Armageddon. If we don’t, not only is it likely that will we hasten our own self-destruction but that our demise will be preceded by the very great and invasive evils of despotic and oppressive political rule. ‘Post-truth is pre-­ fascism’, as one of today’s commentators has noted.37 One thing is for certain, there’s nothing inevitable about whatever decision we end up making, including the continuation or cessation of our current one of irrational standstill. That may seem like stating the blindingly obvious. But our uncritical faith in progress remains as deep-seated as it is unwarranted. How many of us are innocent of the Panglossian delusion that things will, finally, work out all right in the end, that someone or something will keep civilisation’s affirming flame lit on our behalf? The problem is that just as the arrival of Western liberal society was as historically unexpected as its premature annihilation is wholly possible, even probable  at this stage, so too there is nothing set in stone about humanity’s will to self-preservation or indeed its self-destructive impulse. As Berlin observed with characteristic wisdom and candidness: The only way in which humanity has in fact been able to jog along is by making compromises, by creating a kind of life in which as many people as possible could realise as many of their different ideals as possible without doing others in, without killing, without maiming, without exploiting, without enslaving. The equilibrium which is preserved in this way in what are called liberal societies is always exceedingly precarious, and cannot be nailed into human life, cannot be erected on what Dostoevsky called ‘adamantine foundations’. (SR2 419)38

36  William Butler Yeats, ‘A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition’, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume XIV: (2015: Scribner, New York). 37  Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017: Bodley Head, London), 71. 38  ‘The End of the Ideal of a Perfect Society’ is an edited version of a lecture Berlin delivered at the University of New South Wales in 1975. The lecture is published in the latest edition of his The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy (2019: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), 390–419.

Selected Bibliography

Altham, J. E. J. and Harrison, Ross, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: essays on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams (1995: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Annan, Noel, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation  (1990: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London). Austin, J.  L., Philosophical Papers, Urmson, J.O. and Warnock, G. eds. (1962: 1979 ed.: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Austin, J.  L., How To Do Things With Words (1962: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia (1962: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic (1936: Gollancz, London). Ayer, A. J., Philosophical Essays (1954: Macmillan, London). Ayer, A. J. et al., The Revolution in Philosophy (1956: Macmillan, London). Ayer, A. J., Part of My Life (1977: HarperCollins, London). Ayer, A.  J., The Meaning of life and other essays (1990: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London). Baghramian, Maria and Ingram, Attracta, eds., Pluralism: the philosophy and politics of diversity (2000: Routledge, London). Berlin, Isaiah, See list of relevant works by Berlin in Abbreviations at the start of the book. Brown, Clifford, Peter Strawson (2006: Acumen, Stocksfield). Brown, S.  C., ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences (1979: Harvester Press, Sussex), especially chapters by Martin Hollis and Robin Horton. Callcut, Daniel, ed., Reading Bernard Williams (2009: Routledge, London).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6

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Cherniss, Joshua, and Hardy, Henry, ‘Isaiah Berlin’ entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Cherniss, Joshua and Smith, Steven, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Crowder, George, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (2004: Polity, London). Dworkin, Ronald, Lilla, Mark and Silvers, Robert, The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001: New York Review of Books, New York). Fann, K.  T., ed. Symposium on J.  L. Austin (1969: Routledge & Kegan Paul, London). Foot, Philippa, ‘Moral Beliefs’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 59, 1958–59, 83–104. Geuss, Raymond, ‘Thucydides, Nietzsche and Williams’ in his Outside Ethics (2005: Princeton University Press, NJ), 219–33. Glock, Hans-Johann, What is Analytic Philosophy? (2008: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Harcourt, Edward, ed., Morality, Reflection and Ideology (2000: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Hahn, L. E., ed., The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer (1992: Open Court, IL). Hahn, L. E., ed., The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (1999: Open Court, IL). Hall, Edward, Value, Conflict and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory (2020: Chicago University Press, IL). Hampshire, Stuart, ‘Tribute to John Austin’ in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LX, (1959–60). Hardy, Henry, ed., The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions (2009: The Boydell Press, Woodbridge). Hardy, Henry, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (2018: I.B. Tauris: London). Hausheer, Roger, ‘Enlightening the Enlightenment’, in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler eds., Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (2003: American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), 33–50. Ignatieff, Michael, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998: Chatto & Windus, London). Jeffries, Stuart, ‘The quest for truth: A Profile of Bernard Williams’ in The Guardian, November 30, 2002. Jenkins, Mark, Bernard Williams (2006: Acumen, London). Kelly, Aileen, Towards Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance (1998: Yale University Press, Conn). Kelly, Aileen, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov and Bakhtin, (1999: Yale University Press, Conn). Laugier, Sandra ‘’The Vulnerability of Reality: Austin, Normativity and Excuses’ in Savas L.  Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J.  L. Austin: Critical Essays (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 119–142.

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Lendrum, Ann, ‘Remembering J. L. Austin’ in Brian Garvey ed., J.L. Austin on Language (2014: Palgrave, Basingstoke), xxi–xxiv. Lewis, H. D. ed., Clarity is Not Enough: Essays in Criticism of Linguistic Philosophy (1963: George Allen & Unwin, London). Lieberson, Jonathan, and Morgenbesser, Sidney, ‘The Questions of Isaiah Berlin’ and ‘The Choices of Isaiah Berlin’, originally published in the New York Review of Books March 6 and March 20, 1980 respectively and republished as one essay in Jonathan Lieberson Varieties (1988: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, NY) Lukes, Steven, ‘Isaiah Berlin: In Conversation with Steven Lukes’, Salmagundi no.120, Fall, 1998. Lyons, Johnny, Discovering Isaiah Berlin: Johnny Lyons in conversation with Henry Hardy. A transcript of this interview is available on the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/onib/lyons-­hardy-­transcript.pdf Lyons, Johnny, ‘The hegemony of history’, a review of Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli: A very short introduction (2019 new edition) Dublin Review of Books, Issue 114, September 2019. Lyons, Johnny, ‘Isaiah Berlin: philosopher of the human’, Aeon, December 2019. Lyons, Johnny, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin (2020: Bloomsbury, London). Macdonald, Graham and Wright, Crispin eds., Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1987: Blackwell, Oxford). Margalit, Edna and Avishai, eds, Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (1991: The Hogarth Press, London). Matthew, H. G. C. and Brian Harrison eds., The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Entries on J.  L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. Moran, Michael, ‘Isaiah Berlin and ‘The History of Ideas’ Some Personal Impressions’ in his Metaphysical Imagination: and Other Essays on Philosophy and Modern European Mind (2018: FastPrint Publishing, Peterborough), 641–70. Moran, Richard, ‘Williams, History and the “Impurity of Philosophy”’ in Richard Moran, The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays (2017: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 185–200. Murdoch, Iris, ‘Against Dryness’ Encounter, January 1961, 16–20. Palonen, Kari, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (2003: Polity, Cambridge). Pears, David, ‘Wittgenstein and Austin’ in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore eds., British Analytical Philosophy (1966: Routledge and Kegan Paul, London), 17–39. Phillips Griffiths, A, ed., A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (1992: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Reed, Jamie, ‘From Logical Positivism to Metaphysical Rationalism: Isaiah Berlin on the Fallacy of Reduction’, History of Political Thought 29 (2008), No.1, 109–31.

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Rogers, Ben, A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999: Chatto & Windus, London). Russell, Paul, ‘Bernard Williams: Ethics from a human point of view’ in the ‘Footnotes to Plato’ series in the Times Literary Supplement. Russell, Paul, ‘Free Will and the Tragic Predicament: Making Sense of Williams’ forthcoming in Andras Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), Agency, Fate & Luck: Themes from Bernard Williams. Ryan, Alan, ‘Isaiah Berlin: The history of ideas as psychodrama’ in European Journal of Political Theory 2012, vol.12, 1, 61–73. Shklar, Judith, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’ in Nancy Rosenblum ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (1989: Harvard University Press, Mass), 21–38. Shklar, Judith, ‘Subversive Genealogies’ in her Political Thought and Political Thinkers (1998: Chicago University Press, IL), 132–60. Shklar, Judith, ‘Negative Liberty, Positive Liberty in the United States’ in Judith Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson eds, (1998: Chicago University Press, IL), 112–26. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol.1 (1978: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Skinner, Quentin, Machiavelli: a very short introduction (1981: 2019 new ed.: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Skinner, Quentin, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’, in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner, eds. Philosophy in History (1984: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 193–221. Skinner, Quentin, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, the British Academy’s inaugural Isaiah Berlin Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy 117, 2001. Lectures (2002); shortened version, London Review of Books, 4 April 2002, 16–18. Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before Liberalism (1998: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics: Vol.I. Regarding Method (2002; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Skinner, Quentin, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 117, (2002), 237–268. Skinner, Quentin, ‘Surveying The Foundations: a retrospect and reassessment’ in Annabel Brett and James Tully eds. Rethinking The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2006: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 236–61. Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Skinner, Quentin, ‘Truth and Explanation in History’ in M.  E. H.. Nicolette Mout and Wener Stauffacher eds., Truth in Science, the Humanities and Religion: Balzan Symposium 2008, (2010: Springer, Dordrecht). 89–115. Skinner, Quentin, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (2018: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).

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Strawson, P. F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959: University Press, London). Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1966: Methuen, London). Strawson, P. F., Freedom and Resentment and other essays (1974: Methuen, London). Strawson, P.  F., Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985: Columbia University Press, NY). Strawson, P.  F., Analysis and Metaphysics: an introduction to philosophy (1995: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Strawson, P.  F., Philosophical Writings, Galen Strawson and Michelle Montague eds. (2011: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy includes mainly excellent entries on the ideas of Austin, Ayer, Berlin, Strawson and Williams. Thomas, Alan, Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge (2006: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Thomas, Keith, ‘Politics: Looking for Liberty’ a review of Quentin Skinners collected papers et  alia in The New  York Review of Books, vol.52. no. 9, 26 May, 2005. Tully, James, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (1989: Polity, London). Warnock, G. J., English Philosophy Since 1900 (1958: 1969 ed.: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Warnock, G.  J., ‘John Langshaw Austin’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xlix (1963). Warnock, G. J., J. L. Austin (1991: Routledge, London). Wiggins, David, Needs, Values and Truth (1987: Oxford University Press, Oxford). Wiggins, David, ‘Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1991, 61–86. Williams, Bernard, Morality (1972: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Williams, Bernard, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978: Penguin, London). Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (1981: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), 71–83. Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985: Harvard University Press, Mass). Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity (1993: University of California Press, CA). Williams, Bernard, Making Sense of Humanity (1995: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Williams, Bernard, ‘Ethics’ in A. C. Grayling ed. Philosophy 1: a guide through the subject (1995: Oxford University Press, Oxford), 545–584. Williams, Bernard, ‘Contemporary philosophy: a second look’ in Nicolas Bunnin and E.  P. Tsui-James eds., The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (1996: Blackwell, Oxford), 25–37.

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Williams, Bernard, ‘The Reluctant Philosopher’, a tribute to Isaiah Berlin delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 21 March 1998 and published in the Times Literary Supplement, 29 May, 1998. Williams, Bernard, ‘Relativism, History and the Existence of Values’ in Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value (2003: Clarendon Press, Oxford), 106–18. Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2004: Princeton University Press, NJ). Williams, Bernard, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006: Princeton University Press, NJ). Williams, Bernard, The Sense of the Past: Essays on the History of Philosophy (2006: Princeton University Press, NJ). Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (2007: Princeton University Press, NJ). Williams, Bernard, Essays and Reviews:1959–2002 (2014: Princeton University Press, NJ). Williams, Bernard, Obscenity and Film Censorship (2015, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.  F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness trans. (1961, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte eds. (1953, 2009 ed.: Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright eds., (1975: Blackwell, Oxford).

Index1

A Acheson, Dean, 225, 225n15 Akhmatova, Anna, 268, 287 Allais, Lucy, 15n13 Amis, Kingsley, 88, 88n22 Annan, Noel, 5n4 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 22n20, 170n38 Aquinas, St Thomas, 175, 177 Arendt, Hannah, 140 Aristotle, 84, 101n32, 175, 180, 184n9, 223 Auden, W. H., 226n18, 260, 280n25 Austin, J. L., 5, 9, 10, 69–123, 181–183, 200, 263n1, 267, 279, 285 Ayer, A. J., 5, 11, 20, 27–67, 73, 74, 79, 89, 90, 264, 267, 279 B Barnes, Jonathan, 220n6 Barrow, John D., 276n21

Barry, Brian, 226n18 Baz, Avnar, 120n43 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 186 Bennett, Jonathan, 98n28 Berkeley, George, 14n11 Blackburn, Simon, 60, 60n34, 61, 239n41 Blok, Alexander, 260 Boswell, James, 128n6 Bowra, Maurice, 5, 5n4 Bridges, Sir Edward, 153n19 Brodsky, Joseph, 250, 250n52 Burke, Peter, 48n20 Burnyeat, Myles, 171 Butler, Bishop J., 105, 106, 106n35, 165 C Carpenter, Humphrey, 21n18 Cassam, Quassim, 271n14 Cavell, Stanley, 269

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Lyons, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73178-6

295

296 

INDEX

Chekhov, Anton, 52, 282, 283 Cherniss, Joshua L., 4n2 Chomsky, Noam, 22n20, 265 Christ, Jesus, 42–44, 103, 170n38, 184, 185, 194, 195n19, 222, 223 Churchill, Winston, 151, 152, 153n19 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 195n19 Clemenceau, George, 15 Coates, Justin, 132n10 Collingwood, R. G., 215n1 Conant, James, 204n24, 256n60 Constant, Benjamin, 211, 212n34 Cottingham, John, 224n14 Croce, Benedetto, 42

Frege, Gottlob, 78 Freud, Sigmund, 94n26

D Day-Lewis, Cecil, 260 Dennett, Daniel, 22n20, 265–267, 265n4 Descartes, René, 23, 219, 219n4, 235, 265 Dewey, John, 22n20 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 201 Donne, John, 1 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 141 Dummett, Michael, 274 Dunn, John, 177n2, 179n5, 215n1, 219n4 Dworkin, Ronald, 22n20, 166n31

H Hacker, P. M. S., 78n9, 114n39 Hacking, Ian, 287n34 Halifax, Lord, 151 Hall, Edward, 257n61 Hamann, Johann Georg, 7, 18n15 Hampshire, Stuart, 5, 22n20, 44n15, 46, 47, 50n24, 73, 74, 74n5, 142, 143 Hardy, Henry, 196, 208n31, 216n1, 224n14, 260, 268 Hare, R. M., 178n3 Harman, Gilbert, 60 Hart, H. L. A., 5, 85n19, 101–102n32, 170n39 Hausheer, Roger, 18n15 Heaney, Seamus, 280 Hegel, G. W. F., 230, 257, 272 Heidegger, Martin, 162, 162n28, 265n4 Herder, Gottfried, 7, 19n15, 97 Herzen, Alexander, 7, 22n20, 119, 156, 157, 157n24, 164, 166, 167n34, 251n54 Hirschman, Albert, 254n59 Hitler, Adolf, 13, 151

E Einstein, Albert, 7, 53n28 Eliot, T. S., 178n4 F Fermat, Pierre de, 72 Foot, Philippa, 22n20, 65n43 Forster, E. M., 278n23 Frankfurt, Harry, 15n12

G Galilei, Galileo, 186 Gallie, W. B., 92n24 Gardel, Nathan, 260n66 Gaukroger, Stephen, 23n22 Gauthier, David, 177n3 Gellner, Ernest, 115n40, 237 Geuss, Raymond, 254n56 Gray, John, 63n41, 92n24 Grice, Paul, 79n12

 INDEX 

Hobbes, Thomas, 173, 175, 177, 177–178n3, 183, 183n7, 189n17 Hobsbawm, Eric, 251n54 Hollis, Martin, 208, 208n29, 239 Homer, 191, 222 Horton, Robin, 161n27 Housman, A. E., 108, 108n36 Hume, David, 4, 29, 38, 60, 103, 131, 132n9, 209 Husserl, Edmund, 1 Huxley, Julian, 33 I Ignatieff, Michael, 62, 63n41 J James, Clive, 20 James, William, 67, 89, 150, 150–151n18 Jenkins, Roy, 153n19 Joad, C. E. M., 70n2 Johnson, Samuel, 128, 129 K Kane, Robert, 127n4, 142n13 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 15n13, 53n28, 93, 94, 97–102, 98n28, 98n30, 101n32, 104, 106, 112, 112n38, 115, 116, 144, 192–194, 209, 209n33, 234–236, 240 Kekes, John, 239n41 Kelly, Aileen, 157n24 Kenny, Anthony, 82n16, 178n4 Kershaw, Ian, 153n19 Kocis, Robert, 34n10 Kolakowski, Leszek, 260, 260n67 Kripke, Saul, 77 Kuhn, Thomas, 186n11

297

L Lakatos, Imre, 179 Larkin, Philip, 88 Laslett, Peter, 246n50 Laudan, Larry, 48n22 Laugier, Sandra, 90n23, 120n43 Lear, Jonathan, 208n29 Lendrum, Ann, 74n5, 119, 120n43 Leplin, J., 48n22 Lessing, G. E., 266 Lieberson, Jonathan, 26n25 Lindley, Richard, 131n8 Lindsay, A. D., 32 Lukes, Steven, 50n24 Lynch, Michael P., 40n13, 272n17 Lyons, Johnny, 268n7 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 7, 42–44, 44n15, 173, 183n7, 184, 184n8, 184n9, 185, 194, 194–195n19, 195, 197 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 22n20, 227n20 Mackie, John L., 60 MacKinnon, D. M., 73, 74 MacNeill, Eoin, 173 Macpherson, C.B., 177n3 Magee, Bryan, 10n9, 278n23 Marantz, Hayme, 43n14 Margalit, Avishai, 108n36, 250n52, 278 Marx, Karl, 66, 97, 177, 180 McDowell, John, 208n29, 238n39 McGinn, Colin, 54, 88n22, 275n20 McKinney, Ronald, 34n10 Medawar, Peter, 266, 273n18 Mehta, Ved, 10n10 Mencken, H. L., 33 Mill, John Stuart, 22n20, 177, 180 Monk, Ray, 220n6 Montaigne, Michel de, 17, 177n3

298 

INDEX

Moran, Michael, 190n18 Moran, Richard, 231n29 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 26n25 Morris, John, 21n19 Murdoch, Iris, 10n9, 22n20, 46, 65n43, 280n25 N Nagel, Thomas, 22n20, 44n15, 145–146n15, 276n22 Neurath, Otto, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69, 69n1, 162, 162n28, 215n1, 221, 223, 231, 254n56, 286, 286n32, 287 Nussbaum, Martha, 22n20, 222n11, 223n11 O O’Connor, D. J., 178n4 Ord, Toby, 284n29 Orwell, George, 227, 256n60 Owen, Robert, 157, 157n24 Oz, Amos, 4n2 P Parfit, Derek, 203, 220n5 Passmore, John, 82 Pasternak, Boris, 268 Pears, David, 31n5, 75n6, 129n7 Peirce, C. S., 6 Pettit, Philip, 208n29 Pilate, Pontius, 61 Pinker, Steven, 226, 227, 227n20 Plamenatz, John, 173–176, 178, 181, 190 Plato, 13, 73, 75–77, 75n6, 162, 175, 177, 177n3, 178, 180, 196, 200, 222, 223, 226, 268 Popper, Karl, 16, 177n3

Price, H. H., 270 Priest, Graham, 24n24 Protagoras, 13 Pushkin, Alexander, 166 Putnam, Hilary, 2, 2n1, 22n20, 237n38, 238, 238n39, 238n40, 239n41, 269 Q Queloz, Matthieu, 221n9 Quine, van Orman, 65n43, 79, 155n20, 159, 227, 227n20 R Ramsey, Frank, 155n21 Rawls, John, 225 Raz, Joseph, 258 Reid, Thomas, 80, 80n13 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 269 Robinson, Mary, 283 Rogers, Ben, 32n6, 264n2 Rorty, Richard, 22n20, 186, 186n11, 227n20, 232, 232n30, 233, 256n60, 272, 272n16, 274 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 164, 173, 177 Rovelli, Carlo, 266 Runciman, W. G., 102n32 Russell, Bertrand, 5, 19, 21, 29, 61, 78, 269 Russell, Paul, 132n9, 242–243n45 Ryan, Alan, 178, 178n4, 212n34, 216n1 Ryle, Gilbert, 29, 77, 81, 87, 87n20, 110, 111, 120 S Sabine, George, 177n3 Sanches, Francisco, 224, 224–225n14 Sandel, Michael, 62, 63n41

 INDEX 

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 49, 52, 52n25, 162, 162n28 Scanlon, Tim, 48n21 Schlick, Moritz, 29, 60 Scott Fitzgerald, F, 146n15 Seabright, Paul, 168n36 Searle, John, 182 Shakespeare, William, 185 Sheffer, H. M., 218 Shklar, Judith, 254n57, 255–257, 255–256n60 Simons, Peter, 92n25 Skinner, Quentin, 5, 90, 173–213, 215n1, 219n4, 224, 227, 267, 279 Smilansky, Saul, 142n13 Smith, Steven B., 19n15, 47 Snyder, Timothy, 260n67 Socrates, 72–76, 75n6, 77n8, 87, 268, 274 Spender, Stephen, 260 Stalin, Joseph, 13 Stevens, Wallace, 19, 19n16, 149 Stocker, Michael, 254 Stoppard, Tom, 167n34 Strawson, Peter F, 5, 8, 98n28, 100–101n32, 125–171, 240, 240n42, 241, 267, 270–272, 271n14, 275, 279 Stroud, Barry, 82n16, 276n22 Szubka, Tadeusz, 240, 240n42 T Tacitus, Cornelius, 248 Taylor, A. E., 177n3 Taylor, Charles, 22n20, 166n31, 197–198n21 Thomas, Alan, 237n37 Thomas, Lewis, 266 Thomson, J. F., 129n7 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich, 7, 37, 151, 252

299

Tuck, Richard, 225n16 Turgenev, Ivan, 7, 282, 283 Twain, Mark, 25, 26n25 V Vico, Giambattista, 7, 17, 18n15, 67, 98, 98n30, 191, 192, 213, 222, 231 Vlastos, Gregory, 77n8 W Walsh, Dorothy, 40n13 Warnock, Geoffrey, 119, 121, 129n7 Weinberg, Julius, 28n2 Weizmann, Chaim, 151 Whitehead, A. N., 226, 227 Whitman, Walt, 148 Wieseltier, Leon, 108n36 Wiggins, David, 48n22 Wiles, Andrew, 72 Williams, Bernard, 5, 21, 21n19, 22n20, 44n15, 62n38, 74n5, 75n6, 111, 177n3, 215–261, 267, 278–282, 285 Williams, Michael, 37n11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 18, 31, 31n5, 71, 75, 75n6, 77, 78, 78n10, 81, 82, 82n16, 87, 87n20, 89, 120, 182, 193, 205–208, 236n35, 239n41 Wolf, Robert Paul, 98n28 Wolf, Susan, 48n22 Wolin, Sheldon, 178 Woolf, Virginia, 268 Woozley, A. D., 73, 74 Wright, Crispin, 37n11, 272n17 Y Yeats, W. B., 287