Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

or memorable effects upon particular human beings in specific states

of awareness; or why certain musical sounds, when they were juxtaposed, were sometimes called shallow and at other times profound, or lyrical, or vulgar, or morally noble or degraded or characteristic of

this or that national or individual trait; then no general hypothesis of

the kind adopted in physics, no general description or classification

or subsumption under scientific laws of the behaviour of sound, or

of patches of paint, or of black marks on paper, or the utterances of

human beings, would begin to suffice to answer these questions.

What were the non-scientific modes of explanation which could

explain life, thought, art, religion, as the sciences could not? The

romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they

attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, 'intuitive' knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular

about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly

original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical

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vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism,

a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual

human beings were, as it were, 'finite centres', 'aspects', 'moments',

of this enormous cosmic entity-the 'living whole', the world soul,

the transcendental Spirit or Idea, descriptions of which almost recall

the fantasies of early gnosticism. Indeed the sceptical Swiss historian,

Jakob Burckhardt, said that when he listened to Schelling he began

to see creatures with many arms and feet advancing upon him. The

conclusions drawn from this apocalyptic vision are less eccentric. The

finite centres-the individual human beings-understand each other,

their surroundings and themselves, the past and to some degree the

present and the future too, but not in the same sort of way in which

they communicate with one another. When, for example, I maintain

that I understand another human being- that I am sympathetic to

him, follow, 'enter into' the workings of his mind, and that I am

for this reason particularly well qualified to form a j udgement of his

character-of his 'inner' self- 1 am claiming to be doing something

which cannot be reduced to, on the one hand, a set of systematically

classified operations and, on the other, a method of deriving further

information from them which, once discovered, could be reduced to

a technique, and taught to, and applied more or less mechanically by,

a receptive pupil. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the

outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological

classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

There is no substitute for sympathy, understanding, insight, 'wisdom'.

Similarly, Schelling taught that if you wanted to know what it

was, for example, that made a work of art beautiful, or what it was

that gave its own unique character to a historical period, it was

necessary to employ methods different from those of experiment,

classification, induction, deduction, or the other techniques of the

natural sciences. According to this doctrine, if you wished to understand what, for example, had brought about the vast spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution, or why Goethe's Faust was a profounder

work than the tragedies of Voltaire, then to apply the methods of

the kind of psychology and sociology adumbrated by, say, Condillac

or Condorcet would not prove rewarding. Unless you had a capacity

for imaginative insight-for understanding the 'inner', the mental and

emotional-the 'spiritual' -life of individuals, societies, historical

periods, the 'inner purposes' or 'essences' of institutions, nations,

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churches, you would for ever remain unable to explain why certain

combinations form 'unities', whereas others do not: why particular

sounds or words or acts are relevant to, fit with, certain other elements

in the 'whole', while others fail to do so. And this no matter whether

you are 'explaining' the character of a man, the rise of a movement

or a party, the process of artistic creation, the characteristics of an

age, or of a school of thought, or of a mystical view of reality. Nor is

this, according to the view I am discussing, an accident. For reality

is not merely organic but unitary: which is a way of saying that its

ingredients are not merely connected by causal relationships-they do

not merely form a pattern or harmony so that each element is seen

to be 'necessitated' by the disposition of all other elements-but each

'reRects' or 'expresses' the others; for there is a single 'Spirit' or 'Idea'

or 'Absolute' of which all that exists is a unique aspect, or an articulation-and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the

'deeper', the 'more real' it is. A philosophy is 'true' in the proportion

in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has

reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a

statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are inspired by, and

express, the 'spirit' of their milieu-state, culture, nation-which is

itself an 'incarnation' of the self-realisation of the spirit of the universe

conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work

of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an 'echo' of the cosmic harmony.

Man is finite, and his vision will always be fragmentary; the 'deeper'

the individual, the larger and richer the fragment. Hence the lofty

contempt which such thinkers express for the 'merely' empirical or

'mechanical', for the world of everyday experience whose denizens

remain deaf to the inner harmony in terms of which alone anythingand everything-is 'truly' to be understood.

The romantic critics in some cases supposed themselves not merely

to be revealing the nature of types of knowledge or thought or feeling

hitherto unrecognised or inadequately analysed, but to be building

new cosmological systems, new faiths, new forms of life, and indeed

to be direct instruments of the process of the spiritual redemption,

or 'self-realisation', of the universe. Their metaphysical fantasies arefortunately, I may add-all but dead today; but the incidental light which they shed on art, history, and religion transformed the outlook

of the west. By paying a great deal of attention to, the unconscious

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activity o f the imagination, to the role of irrational factors, to the part

played in the mind by symbols and myths, to awareness of unanalysable

affinities and contrasts, to fundamental but impalpable connections

and differences which cut across the conventional lines of rational

classification, they often succeeded in giving an altogether novel

account of such phenomena as poetical inspiration, religious experience,

political genius, of the relationship of art to social development, or of

the individual to the masses, or of moral ideals to aesthetic or biological

facts. This account was more convincing than any that had been

given before; at any rate than the doctrines of the eighteenth century,

which had not treated such topics systematically, and largely left them

to the isolated utterances of mystically inclined poets and essayists.

So too Hegel, despite all the philosophical obfuscation for which

he was responsible, set in motion ideas which have become so universal

and familiar that we think in terms of them without being aware of

their relative novelty. This is true, for example, of the idea of the

history of thought as a continuous process, capable of independent

study. There existed, of course, accounts- usually mere catalogues

raisonnls-of particular philosophical systems in the ancient world or

in the Middle Ages, or monographs devoted to particular thinkers.

But it was Hegel who developed the notion of a specific cluster of

ideas as permeating an age or a society, of the effect of those ideas

upon other ideas, of the many invisible links whereby the feelings,

the sentiments, the thoughts, the religions, the laws and the general

outlook-what is nowadays called ideology-of one generation are

connected with the ideology of other times or places. Unlike his

predecessors Vico and Herder, Hegel tried to present this as a coherent,

continuous, rationally analysable development-the first in the fatal

line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx

to Spengler and Toynbee and all those who find spiritual comfort in

the discovery of vast imaginary symmetries in the irregular stream of

human history.

Although much of this programme is a tantasy, or at any rate a

form of highly subjective poetry in prose, yet the notion that the

many activities of the human spirit are interrelated, that the artistic

or scientific thought of an age is best understood i'n its interplay with

the social, economic, theological, legal activities pursued in the society

in which artists and scientists live and work-the very notion of

cultural history as a source oflight-is itself a cardinal step in the history

of thought. And again Schelling (following Herder) is largely respons-

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ible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters

may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express

it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians; this

is so because artists tend to have a greater degree of sensibility to the

contours of their own age (or of other ages and cultures) than either

trained antiquaries or professional journalists, inasmuch as they are

irritable organisms; more responsive to, and conscious of, inchoate,

half-understood factors which operate beneath the surface in a given

milieu, factors which may only come to full maturity at a later period.

This was the sense in which, for �xample, Karl Marx used to maintain that Balzac in his novels had depicted the life and character not so much of his own time, as of the men of the 6os and 70s of the nineteenth century, whose lineaments, while they were still in embryo, impinged upon the sensibilities of artists long before they emerged

into the full light of day. The romantic philosophers vastly exaggerated

the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive or poetical insight;

but their fervid vision, which remained mystical and irrationalist no

matter how heavily disguised in quasi-scientific or quasi-lyrical

terminology, captivated the imagination of the young Russian intellectuals of the 30s and 405, and seemed to open a door to a nobler and calmer world from the sordid reality of the Empire ruled by Tsar