Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.

The quarrel between these rival types of knowledge-that which

results from methodical inquiry, and the more impalpable kind that

consists in the 'sense of reality', in 'wisdom' -is very old. And the

claims of both have generally been recognised to have some validity:

the bitterest clashes have been concerned with the precise line which

marks the frontier between their territories. Those who made large

claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their

adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favour of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their

opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd

claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to

understand what they are; when the results of their labours, even

when they are not nugatory, tend to take unpredicted, often catastrophic directions-and all' this because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are

always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural

science. Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable,

not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world

whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each

context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically)

best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to dis-

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tinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study

and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the

most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features

of our world, which, if anything, are over-familiar, so that their

'inexorable' pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly

noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an

object of study. This is the distinction that permeates the thought of

Pascal and Blake, Rousseau and Schelling, Goethe and Coleridge,

Chateaubriand and Carlyle; of all those who speak of the, reasons of

the heart, or of men's moral or spiritual nature, of sublimity and

depth, of the 'profounder' insight of poets and prophets, of special

kinds of understanding, of inwardly comprehending, or being at one

with, the world. To these latter thinkers both Tolstoy and Maistre

belong. Tolstoy blames everything on our ignorance of empirical

causes, and. Maistre on the abandonment of Thomist logic or the

theology of the Catholic Church. But these avowed professions are

belied by the tone and content of what in fact the two great critics

say. Both stress, over and over again, the contrast between the 'inner'

and the 'outer', the 'surface' which alone is lighted by the rays of

science and of reason, and the 'depths'-'the real life lived by men'.

For Maistre, as later for Barres, true knowledge- wisdom-lies in an

understanding of, and communion with, Ia terre et les morts (what

has this to do with Thomist logic?)- the great unalterable movement

created by the links between the dead and the living and the yet

unborn and the land on which they live; and it is this, perhaps, or

something akin to it, that, in their respective fashions, Burke and

Taine, and their many imitators, have attempted to convey. As for

Tolstoy, to him such mystical conservatism was peculiarly detestable,

since it seemed to him to evade the central question by merely restating

it, concealed in a cloud of pompous rhetoric, as the answer. Yet he,

too, in the end, presents us with the vision, dimly discerned by K utuzov

and by Pierre, of Russia in her vastness, and what she could and what

she could not do or suffer, and how and when-all of which Napoleon

and his advisers (who knew a great deal but not of what was relevant

to the issue) did not perceive; and so (although their knowledge of

history and science and minute causes was perhaps greater than

Kutuzov's or Pierre's) were led duly to their doom. Maistre's paeans

to the superior science of the great Christian soldiers of the past and

Tolstoy's lamentations about our scientific ignorance should not

mislead anyone as to the nature of what they are in fact defending:

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awareness of the 'deep currents', the raisons de ctZur, which they did

not indeed themselves know by direct experience; but beside which,

they were convinced, the devices of science were but a snare and a

delusion.

Despite their deep dissimilarity and indeed violent opposition to

one another, Tolstoy's sceptical realism and Maistre's dogmatic

authoritarianism are blood brothers. For both spring from an agonised

belief in a single, serene vision, in which all problems are resolved, all

doubts stilled, peace and understanding finally achieved. Deprived of

this vision, they devoted all their formidable resollrces from their

very different, and indeed often incompatible, positions, to the elimination of all possible adversaries and critics of it. The faiths for whose mere abstract possibility they fought were not, indeed, identical. It is

the predicament in which they found themselves and that caused them

to dedicate their strength to the lifelong task of destruction, it is their

common enemies and the strong likeness between their temperaments

that make them odd but unmistakable allies in a war which they were

both conscious of fighting until their dying day.

V I I I

Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were-one the apostle of the gospel

that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims

of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering-they were united

by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both

by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto

differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world,

observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle

devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the

superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat,

however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a

condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons

of criticism, with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were overgenerously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from nonnal intellectual proces5es

to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps,

offering a path to peace and salvation. Maistre began as a moderate

liberal and ended by pulverising the new nineteenth-century world

from the solitary citadel of his own variety of ultramontane Catholicism.

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Tolstoy began with a view of human life and history which contradicted all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations, and which, in consequence, he could scarcely be said to have embraced in the sense

of practising it, either as a writer or as a man. From this, in his old

age, he passed into a form of life in which he tried to resolve the

glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events,

and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe, by behaving, in

the end, as if factual questions of this kind were not the fundamental

issues at all, only the trivial preoccupations of an idle, ill-conducted

life, while the real questions were quite different. But it was of no

use: the Muse cannot be cheated. Tolstoy was the least superficial

of men : he could not swim with the tide without being drawn

irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below;

and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that;

he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his

appalling, destructive, sense of what was false frustrated this final

effort at self-deception as it ciid all the earlier ones; and he died in

agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and

his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can

neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there

is with what there ought to be. Tolstoy's sense of reality was until

the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which

he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect

shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind

and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud

and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold

and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented

and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers,

by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly

isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old

man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.

Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

'Human life is a great social duty,' (said Louis Blanc]:

'man must constantly sacrifice himself for society.'

'Why?' I asked suddenly.

'How do you mean "Why?"- but surely the whole

purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'

'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices

and nobody enjoys himself.'

'You are playing with words.'

'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied,

laughing. Alexander Herzen, 'My Past and Thoughts'1

Since the age of thirteen . . . I have served one idea,

marched under one banner-war against all imposed

authority-against every kind of deprivation of freedom,

in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.

I should like to go on with my little guerilla war-like a

real Cossack-11:sj tigtflt F1111s1-as the Germans say.

Aleunder Herzen, letter to Mazzini1

OF all the Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century,

Herzen and Bakunin remain the most arresting. They were divided

by many differences both of doctrine and of temperament, but they

were at one in placing the ideal of individual liberty at the centre of

their thought and action. Both dedicated their lives to rebellion against

every form of oppression, social and political, public and private, open

and concealed; but the very multiplicity of their gifts has tended to

obscure the relative value of their ideas on this crucial topic.

Bakunin was a gifted journalist, whereas Herzen was a writer of